Sunday 2 November 7.30pm

£20 (£15 concessions)

The early 1600s were a period of pestilence and plotting, but they were also a golden age of popular music and drama. Using the wind and stringed instruments of the age and drawing on historical sources, long-established early music group The York Waits provide a soundtrack and narrative to the origins and aftermath of the notorious Gunpowder Plot of 1605. There are songs and dance tunes of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, many of which became popular throughout Europe … and Macbeth’s witches make an appearance.

The singers Deborah Catterall and Gareth Glyn Roberts (who also narrates) feature in the concert and instruments include sackbuts, shawms, harp, recorders, curtal, the early forms of violin and guitar plus bagpipes and pipe and tabor.

York was not only the childhood home of Guy Fawkes – before he departed to become a mercenary in the Catholic cause overseas – but his schoolmates included two other Gunpowder Plotters, John and Kit Wright, plus the future Jesuit priest Oswald Tesimond who later wrote an account of the 1605 conspiracy. Extracts from this are part of the narration at the concert.

The York Waits – frequent performers at the NCEM – were formed in the 1970s, shortly after the inaugural York Early Music Festival, to play music and instruments of the medieval and renaissance periods and do so by recreating the official city band of York as it was in the 15th-17th centuries. The Waits have performed throughout the UK and in many countries overseas and have issued 10 recordings on themes and people that have included the Spanish Armada, Richard III, Henry VIII and the Gunpowder Plot.

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