Chorus Of Opera North In Music, Minimalism And Avant-Garde Antics

Following their acclaimed performance in Opera North’s concert staging of Aida, the Company’s 36-strong Chorus will take centre stage this summer for two eclectic programmes ranging from sublime early music to the avant-garde antics of Cornelius Cardew and the ‘holy minimalism’ of Arvo Pärt.

Performed at St Margaret's Church, Ilkley on 6 June and Salts Mill, Saltaire on 21 June, She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not is an evening of seductive song accompanied by a piano duet, taking in the early music of Palestrina, twentieth century rarities by Florent Schmitt and John Bevan Baker and jazz standards by Fats Waller and Cole Porter.

On 27 and 28 June, the Chorus will animate the space of Leeds Art Gallery’s Tiled Hall in Byrd-Cage: The Shape of Sound, a unique concert as part of the first ever Yorkshire Sculpture International festival.

Hand-picked to explore the ability of sound to transform space, the programme brings together the Renaissance polyphony of Byrd, Andrea Gabrieli and Jacob Handl with the 20th and 21st-century minimalism of John Cage and Arvo Pärt, promising an immersion in the sculptural power and enduring mystery of the human voice.

At the heart of the concert is an excerpt from the revolutionary 1970 work The Great Learning, by the British composer Cornelius Cardew.