Friday 20 December 7.30pm
£25.00 (£23.00 concessions | £7.00 under 35)

Tim Bayley
Lizzie Gutteridge
Anna Marshall
Susan Marshall
William Marshall
Deborah Catterall

The York Waits play and sing medieval and renaissance music for winter and the festive season.

The concert has music that ranges from 15th century carols to 17th century ballads and takes its title from Shakespeare’s description of winter, written at a period when England was shivering from a “little ice age”. Christmas time in Elizabethan York was enlivened by a Yuletide procession that would be suppressed by Puritans, who also attempted to outlaw Old Father Christmas, a mythical figure who features in medieval carols. The Waits perform secular and sacred music that evokes such traditions, using the loud shawms and sackbuts that their forbears would have played in the streets of York. The concert also includes Christmas music by composers who include William Byrd, and the Waits muster consorts of recorders and crumhorns, plus harp, organ, violins, curtal, bagpipes and hurdy gurdy.

‘…a dazzling seasonal celebration…characteristically infectious and, as always, they brought the music of days gone by to vivid, brilliant life‘ York Press

theyorkwaits.org.uk

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