Londinium Consort will present an exploration of the pressing questions of our modern era, with new works and arrangements paired alongside thematically linked pieces by composers John Dowland and Claudio Monteverdi.
Londinium Consort is an emerging ensemble based in London comprising current and former students of the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Exploring the intersection of old and new music, the ensemble takes its name from the ancient name of the City of London, highlighting the city’s living history and richly varied cultural landscape.
In 2024, Londinium Consort won the New Elizabethan Award organized by the Musician’s Company and they made their debut at the Wigmore Hall in February 2025 in the New Elizabethan Award Prize winner’s concert.
They are grateful to the Continuo Foundation for generously funding their first album, Crossing Paths, which was released in 2025.
We are delighted to announce that the ensemble will also be the guest artists for our Annual Schools Concert from 2-3pm.
To find out more, see Londinium Consort
With the support of a generous legacy from Dr Philip Da Costa
EARLY MUSIC WITH A DIFFERENCE AT SKIPTON MUSIC
A large and enthusiastic audience braved the cold and wet for Skipton Music’s first concert of 2026, given by the Londinium Consort.
The consort is an early music ensemble – with a difference! The combination of instruments is unusual (recorder, two bass viols and lute/theorbo) but proved wonderfully flexible. And the repertoire is an intriguing blend of “old” music in more or less straight versions, contemporary music written or commissioned by the ensemble, and contemporary re-imaginings of older music.
With such variety there is something for every taste. I particularly enjoyed Anne Sutton’s heartfelt account of Monteverdi’s “lament of the nymph”, and later her ethereal performance of Purcell’s sublime “evening hymn upon a ground”. I was also very taken by a piece by Thomas Shorthouse which made imaginative use of sounds both of live performers and of electronics, savoured one by one against a slow-moving harmonic background. This was immediately and thrillingly followed by Ben Finlay’s re-imagining of Dowland’s “Can she excuse”, starting with a frenetic duet between lute and recorder, morphing into an equally frenetic Irish jig, before revealing the Dowland song in (more or less) its original version. And as their encore the ensemble signed off in ebullient mood with a baroque duet between soprano and recorder (Monteverdi?) over a distinctly Latin American ground bass from the two viols. Not a concert for purists, but who cares when the music is played with such conviction and flair!
In an exclusive for the Skipton Music audience, the quintet was pleased to announce that, following the concert, it would be henceforth operating under the new name serpentine.iii
Charles Dobson
Click here to sign up for Listening Club! Welcome to the Skipton Music Listening Club. Each month, we choose a piece of music which is being performed in that month's Skipton Music Concert and the week before the concert, we meet online to listen and have a chat about it - hopefully with some special […]
