Previous concerts
The Ripieno Choir performs a wide repertoire, ranging from early Renaissance through Baroque to the twenty-first century, as evidenced by our previous programmes.
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 | June 2024: Water Night Music inspired by rivers, lakes and the sea, by composers including Victoria, John Browne, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, James MacMillan, and Eric Whitacre. Full programme |
 | March 2024: Everlasting Light Music from across the ages, with a focus on things eternal. Composers ranged from Tallis to Owens, via Purcell, Bach, Fauré, Chilcott and Pentatonix. The organist was George Inscoe. Full programme |
 | January 2024: Twelfth Night concert We look back to Christmas with seasonal music from across the ages, readings, and organ music. This annual concert was again directed by our former apprentice conductor Mary Offer. Full programme |
 | November 2023: Sing Joyfully The Ripieno Choir celebrated William Byrd’s 400th anniversary with the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble. Full programme |
 | June 2023: Fire and Ice Exploring Renaissance passions: through the music of his 16th-century contemporaries, we explore philospher Juan Luis Vives' guidelines for understanding human emotions. Full programme |
 | March 2023: I Heard a Voice Music from the ‘golden age’ of Portuguese polyphony, by Manuel Cardoso, Duarte Lobo, Vicente Lusitano and Estêvão Lopes Morago, including Cardoso’s mass Missa pro defunctis. Full programme |
| January 2023: Twelfth Night concert A look back at the festive season, including carol arrangements, seasonal readings, and featuring a piece composed by our former apprentice conductor Mary Offer, who directed the concert. Full programme |
 | November 2022: Vespers of 1616 This first UK choral performance (at least in modern times) of Amadio Freddi’s Vespers was accompanied by The Gonzaga Band, who had rediscovered and recorded this forgotten masterpiece. Full programme |
 | July 2022: Vigil A repeat performance of The Ripieno Choir's collaboration with English Arts Chorale, which included Tallis’s Spem in alium and Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, given in St Mary’s, Reigate. Full programme |
| June 2022: Vigil The Ripieno Choir and English Arts Chorale joined forces to perform two tours de force of the choral repertoire, Tallis’s Spem in alium and Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil. Full programme |
 | March 2022: The Solitary City Exploring settings of prayers of contrition and poetic laments by three deeply devout composers: Renaissance masters Tallis and Byrd, alongside the contemporary composer James MacMillan. Full programme |
| January 2022: Twelfth Night concert A musical look back at the festive season, including arrangements of well-known carols, seasonal readings, organ music, and featuring two first performances. Full programme |
 | November 2021: Spanish Gold Rare and beautiful music by masters of the Spanish Renaissance who were connected with the city of Seville – Morales, Ceballos, Guerrero, Lobo and more. The Ripieno Choir was joined by the world-renowned His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. Full programme |
 | January 2020: Twelfth Night concert A musical look back at the festive season including traditional carols, unusual carols, and readings. In aid of the church’s re-wiring fund. Full programme |
 | November 2019: A Rose Without Thorns Music for the Blessed Virgin Mary: motets, antiphons, and canticles by Renaissance masters and modern day composers, including our very own Huw Morgan. The programme included Tallis's Ave Rosa, Sine Spinis, Palestrina's Magnificat (primi toni), and settings of the four seasonal Marian antiphons. Full programme |
 | June 2019: Threads of Golden Song The Ripieno Choir explored the intimate web of connections between those two great British composers for choir, Orlando Gibbons and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The programme was based around RVW's Mass in G Minor, which was the first notable Latin mass setting by a British composer since those of Byrd and Tallis. Full programme |
 | March 2019: Bach's B Minor Mass The Ripieno Choir were once again delighted to team up with the Monteverdi String Band, and an all-star cast of virtuoso soloists, to perform JS Bach's mighty Mass in B Minor, a monument of a work cherished today by choirs and audiences the world over. Full programme |
| January 2019: Twelfth Night Concert A musical look back at the festive season including traditional carols, unusual carols, and readings. In aid of the church’s re-wiring fund. Full programme |
 | November 2018: Voices Across the Mountains Jacob Handl (also known as Jacobus Gallus) remains one of the undiscovered treasures of the Renaissance, a prolific composer of such skill and quality that he was able to compose masterpiece after masterpiece in a dazzling array of styles. In our first concert under the baton of Huw Morgan we explored many of these alongside the influencing styles of Lassus, Croce, Willaert and Andrea Gabrieli. Full programme |
 | June 2018: At the round earth's imagined corners The six ‘songs’ of Parry’s noble Songs of Farewell are a musical summation of his compositional life, reflecting his love of English madrigals and partsongs, and a persuasive reminder of his significant contribution to the English choral tradition. And in his final concert with The Ripieno Choir David Hansell indulged us with some rather scintilating and sublime Renaissance motets Full programme |
 | April 2018: Bach Motets The Ripieno Choir repeated the programme from our successful Bach Motets concert as part of the Brandenburg Choral Festival of London, to much acclaim, including "sopranos to die for"... With The Brook Street Band Full programme |
 | March 2018: Bach Motets The Ripieno Choir returned to our spiritual home of Bach, with three of his fabulous motets and his seldom performed Kyrie eleison in F. Partnering Bach this time were two other great choral masters who also served in major German courts and/or churches – Lassus and Schütz – demonstrating the musical progression from Renaissance, through early to late Baroque styles. With The Brook Street Band Full programme |
| January 2018: Twelfth Night concert A musical look back at the festive season including traditional carols, unusual carols, and readings. In aid of the church’s re-wiring fund. Full programme |
 | Nov 2017: Monteverdi 1610 Vespers The Ripieno Choir rounded off our our 70th, and Monteverdi’s 450th, anniversary celebrations with a sell out performance of Vespro della Beata Vergine – Monteverdi’s spectacular collection of vocal and instrumental music in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. With Alexandra Stevenson, Lucy Cronin, Andrew King, Nicholas Hurndall Smith, Paul Young, Edmund Danon, Thomas Humphreys, The Monteverdi String Band, English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble and the largest Lute in captivity. Full programme |
 | Jun 2017: Roads as yet untravelled The Ripieno Choir has enjoyed performing a wide volume and variety of music over our 70 years. However, there are exceptional pieces we've wanted to perform that haven’t fitted into our recent concert programming... so we pulled them all together into one indulgent concert covering a diverse range of eras, geographies and characters – from Monteverdi and Byrd, to Mendelssohn and Messiaen. Full programme |
 | May 2017: Il divino Claudio Claudio Monteverdi’s employers considered his music so fine ‘they not only paid, but thanked him too’ and his contemporary musicians coined the soubriquet il divino Claudio. Who are we to disagree? On his 450th birthday (probably), we paid tribute to the great man with an evening of his glorious music. Full programme |
 | March 2017: Jacobean Secrets In Jacobean England there were few more hazardous lifestyle choices than openly professing sympathy towards Roman Catholicism, yet Latin motets were composed and, against all odds, survived in private collections. And they were rather good. As were the English anthems that completed the programme. Full programme |
 | January 2017: A concert for Twelfth Night A musical look back at the festive season including traditional carols, unusual carols, readings, and that song. In aid of the church’s re-wiring fund. Full programme |
 | November 2016: Handel's Messiah Ripieno sang Messiah for the first time to mark their 50th anniversary and again ten years later. As we hadn’t sung it since then, it was an obvious choice to mark the choir's 70th anniversary too. An experienced and accomplished orchestra and team of soloists joined us a memorable and sell-out occasion. Full programme |
 | June 2016: Taverner & Byrd John Taverner's Western Wynde Mass and William Byrd's Mass for four voices were interspersed with Igor Stravinsky' motets Ave Maria & Pater noster and Maurice Duruflé's Four motets on Gregorian melodies & Notre Père Four great composers, unrelentingly brilliant music in strongly contrasting styles. Full programme |
 | March 2016: Heaven's Sparkling Courtiers A survey of the glorious repertoire that has been inspired by our wonderful cathedrals and their choirs. We travelled from the Restoration years of Purcell through the heyday of the large-scale ‘Festival Anthem’ (Hubert Parry) to 20th century classic repertoire from Gerald Finzi, acknowledging en route significant anniversaries of William Sterndale Bennett and Charles Wood. Full programme |
 | November 2015: Venetian Echoes We celebrated the extraordinarily rich music of Venice in the decades either side of 1600 with performances of Andrea Gabrieli's 12-part Magnificat, Giovanni Croce's scintillating Missa Percussit Saul, four of Monteverdi's sacred motets, his Magnificat and Lauda Jerusalem (from the 1610 Vespers). We rounded the evening off with Schutz's Jauchzet dem Herrn and Deutsches Magnificat. Full programme |
 | June 2015: The Gift of Music The words of Musica Dei donum (“Music, the gift of God“) set the scene for this concert as we performed two settings of them: one by Lassus and another by John Rutter. We also paid tribute to the recently deceased John Tavener with his iconic settings of William Blake’s equally iconic poems The Lamb and The Tyger; and David Hansell looked back over his twenty years with the choir with some personal highlights. Full programme |
 | March 2015: Masterpieces of the Renaissance This programme spanning the sixteenth century offered, in response to audience demand, another chance to hear John Browne's Stabat Mater from the Eton Choir Book. The programme also included more Eton music - Robert Wylkynson's sumptuous nine-part Salve Regina. These were complemented by three masterpieces by John Taverner and joyful motets for Easter by Willian Byrd and Peter Philips. Full programme |
 | November 2014: La Chapelle Royale We marked the 250th anniversary of Jean-Philippe Rameau by performing a number of Rameau’s works and those of his predecessors and contemporaries. Highlights included the magnificent Litanies by Marc-Antoine Charpentier in its unusual choral disposition of SSSATB, and the outstanding mass (also in six parts) by the almost unknown, though aptly named, Louis le Prince. Read the Early Music Review of this concert. See full programme |
 | June 2014: The Flight of Song A typically mixed concert programme focused on English composers. Performances of folk songs and part songs were juxtaposed with pieces by Howard Skempton, one of today's leading composers of choral music, and Cyril Rootham. Howard Skempton joined the choir on stage to introduce his piece and to perform classical accordion solos. See full programme |
 | March 2014: Bach: A Calendar of Cantatas Bach′s cantatas — mostly written for the principal Sunday services at the Leipzig churches between 1723 and 1750 — are much admired but little performed. In this programme we performed choral movements from several of them following the performance order of the liturgical year, complete with a raid on Christmas Oratorio for its New Year music. See full programme |
 | November 2013: Britten & the Cathedral Tradition We celebrated the centenary of Britten’s birth with a selection of his best contributions to the repertoire of cathedral music, ranging from his exquisite early A Hymn to the Virgin to the mature Antiphon. The music by his contemporaries, Herbert Howells and Kenneth Leighton, offered complementary views of the same or similar texts. See full programme |
 | June 2013: Fine Knacks for Ladies The programme included tributes to master lutenist John Dowland on the 450th anniversary of his birth and to Benjamin Britten on his centenary. These were paired with Eric Whitacre’s Flower Songs and a generous selection of Victorian and Edwardian partsongs. See full programme |
 | March 2013: Fathers of Musicke In this programme the riches of William Byrd's Mass for Five Voices were heard alongside music from earlier generations – a group of motets by Thomas Tallis and the spectacular late medieval polyphony of John Browne’s Stabat Mater, the finest work in the famous Eton Choir Book. This piece has aptly been described as an audible cathedral. See full programme |
 | November 2012: Bach at Christmas The radiant joy of Bach's Christmas Oratorio (Parts i-iii) was complemented by the exuberant Magnificat, complete with the extra seasonal movements which were removed after the first performance. The choir was accompanied by a baroque orchestra, topped by the distinctive gleam of Bach’s high trumpet parts. See full programme |
 | June 2012: La Gracieuse The programme had a French accent, inspired by the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy. His exquisite Trois Chansons, settings of medieval poetry, was the centrepiece. This was complemented by some of his piano music and songs by Saint-Saëns, Fauré (his popular full programme |
 | March 2012: Bach & Beyond The first of two exciting Bach programmes this year featured his wonderful motets - which famously impressed even Mozart. Ranging from the sonorous and reflective Komm, Jesu, komm to the exuberant counterpoint of Lobet den Herrn, these pieces are among the highlights of the entire choral repertoire. See full programme |
 | November 2011: Victoria - A Matter of Death and Life The Choir’s quatercentenary tribute to Tomás Luis de Victoria (c.1548-1611) moved towards its end with a performance of the Officium Defunctorum (Requiem), his swan-song and heart-felt tribute to his patroness the Dowager Empress Maria. See full programme |
 | June 2011: Songs & Sonnets No Victoria in this programme, but the quatercentenary theme was reflected by the inclusion of songs from William Byrd’s 1611 publication of Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets. The choir was joined by Chordophony, the only professional lute quartet in the world. See full programme |
 | March 2011: Victoria and the Victorians The programme featured Victoria's; music for Passiontide and Easter with anthems by Parry, Stanford, Elgar & Stainer See full programme |
 | November 2010: Victoria, Byrd & All Saints At the beginning of our year-long celebration of the 400th anniversary of Tomás Luis de Victoria's death, this programme featured his wonderful Missa O quam gloriosum, plainchant for All Saints and William Byrd's motets for All Saints, accompanied by cornetts and sackbuts. See full programme |
 | June 2010: Rose among the heather The programme featured partsongs by Schumann, Mendelssohn and their English contemporaries. See full progamme |
 | March 2010: Light from light The programme spanned the centuries with settings of O nata lux de lumine by Tallis (1575) and Jonathan Rathbone (2008), Byrd's O lux beata trinitas and Bob Chilcott's Canticles of Light. From the darker side came settings of Tenebrae factae sunt and Poulenc's sublime Litanies á la Vierge Noire. See full programme |
 | November 2009: Mozart and Haydn Even by Haydn's standards, the Theresa Mass is a joyous work - an irresistible confection of graceful melodies and vibrant counterpoint. Mozart's famous Requiem, left unfinished at his death and wreathed in legends, provided a noble contrast. We performed the completion by Duncan Druce, which makes far more colourful use of the orchestra than is often heard. See full programme |
 | June 2009: Here, there & everywhere A highly varied programme saw luscious arrangements of 20th century songs by Cole Porter and Lennon/McCartney jostling with 19th century partsongs, madrigals by Thomas Weelkes and Claudio Monteverdi from around 1600 and Handel representing the 18th century. Our soloists performed some of Handel’s beautiful though little known pastoral songs for voice, violin and continuo. See full progamme |
 | March 2009: St Matthew Passion For J.S. Bach's masterpiece we were joined by Andrew King (Evangelist), Simon Birchall (Jesus), Jenny Hansell soprano, Clare Wilkinson alto, Paul Young tenor, Jozic Koc bass and the Chameleon Arts Baroque Orchestra. See full programme |
 | November 2008: Angels and Kings The programme had as its spine Victoria's mass O magnum mysterium, and included a sequence of motets, plainchant and instrumental pieces by Schütz, Lassus and Praetorius, which told the Christmas story. The choir was accompanied by organ, cornetts and sackbuts. See full programme |
 | June 2008: Cloud capped towers The marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the most English of English composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams, with a programme that included both his Three Shakespeare Songs and the skilfully and wittily arranged Five English Folksongs. The programme also included music by composers he admired including Parry and Finzi. See full programme |
 | March 2008: Heaven Restored The programme featured some of the grander anthems and motets from the cathedral tradition, including music by Purcell, Wesley, Stanford and Parry (with organ accompaniment) See full programme |
 | November 2007: Bach @ Christmas The programme included the festive Mass in F, the motet Singet dem Herrn and the pre-Advent Cantata 140 (Wachet auf) See full programme |
 | June 2007: A Sprig of Thyme The programme featured a sequence of traditional songs arranged by John Rutter and an anniversary tribute to Elgar. See full programme |
 | March 2007: Palestrina & Purcell Having marked the choir's 60th anniversary with the work that also marked the 50th, it seemed fitting to follow with music from two composers who had scarcely featured in programmes over the previous decade: the anthems of Purcell neatly complementing Palestrina's Missa Brevis. See full programme |
 | November 2006: Messiah To mark the choir's 60th anniversary, Handel's masterpiece was performed with soloists Jenny Hansell soprano, Clare Wilkinson alto, Andrew King tenor, Simon Birchall bass and the Chameleon Arts Baroque Orchestra See full programme |
 | June 2006: Night & Day The programme began with David Hansell's tribute to Mozart – The Fairly Magic Flute. It also included Finzi’s Seven Poems of Robert Bridges and songs by Lennon/McCartney and Cole Porter. See full programme |