Nicola Lisle talks to Rory McCleery, founder of The Marian Consort

If you enjoy celebrating Christmas by stepping back a few hundred years, then next week’s concert of Renaissance music by The Marian Consort, in the glorious setting of Keble College chapel, should tick all the right boxes.

Christmas with Shepherds tells the story of the Nativity through the eyes of the shepherds, drawing on some of the most popular festive choral works of Renaissance Rome.

“Essentially it’s presenting music which was performed and circulated in Rome during the 16th century,” explains director Rory McCleery, who started The Marian Consort nearly 10 years ago while studying at Oxford University.

“It also gives you a wonderful, kaleidoscopic overview of Renaissance a cappella music and the way it was composed, but also of how composers influenced each other.

“At the heart of the programme we have the most beautiful Christmas motet by Jean Mouton, a French court composer whose music was very highly esteemed and travelled all across Europe.

“This piece, Quaeramus cum pastoribus, was clearly a huge inspiration for several generations of composers.

“Quite a few composers chose to write motets based on Mouton’s motet, which has a real element of wanting to pay homage and respect to a composer you really admire. I think it’s really interesting that this one motet by Jean Mouton inspired lots of masses, but lots of motets as well.”

One such motet, which features in Christmas with Shepherds, was written by the Italian composer Annibale Stabile, a pupil of Palestrina. “He was active in Rome at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century,” says Rory. “He probably wrote his motet almost 100 years after Mouton wrote his.

“What he does is to transform Mouton’s motet from a four-voice, very close-knit, beautifully-textured piece, typical of the early 16th century, into something much more typical of the late 16th and early 17th century.

“So you’ve got eight voices in two choirs, and they’re all in dialogue with each other all the time. He uses lots of Mouton’s original music, but he puts in lots of his own as well.”

Other composers featuring in the concert are Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cristóbal de Morales and Francisco Guerrero.

“It’s wonderful because there’s this real sense of homage but also of competition and compositional flair. So it’s really exciting music to listen to.”

Rory has been passionate about early music since his student days – he was both Organ and Domus Academic scholar of St Peter’s College – and formed The Marian Consort in 2006.

“We wanted to try singing Renaissance a cappella music, but singing one to a part. We’d all sung in various college choirs, and I’d been a cathedral scholar, but we’d never done it with a chamber music force, and that’s what we wanted to try. So that’s how it started, and it’s just carried on.”

Meanwhile, Rory is excited to be returning to Keble College, where the group has previously performed at the Early Music Festival.

“It’s a really fabulous acoustic at Keble, and I think it will fit this Christmas shepherds programme like a glove.”

Where and when
The Marian Consort: Christmas with Shepherds, Keble College chapel, Oxford. Tuesday, 7.30pm   musicatoxford.com