The Orlando Consort makes a welcome return to the Festival after their highly successful concert in 2008. This light-hearted programme explores the perennial battle to please the senses in which good food and good music go hand in hand. Their gastronomic and musical tour takes in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris, with the risqué songs of Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut; fourteenth-century Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, where the monks mix sumptuous religious music with songs of feasting; fifteenth-century Florence and its carnival songs; the Burgundian court, with beautiful songs about its wines by Guillaume Dufay and Loyset Compere; and rumbustious songs about food and wine from Renaissance Spain, Portugal and Germany. These fascinating glimpses of eating and drinking habits build up a vivid picture of daily life in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Tickets for this concert include refreshments in the village hall during an extended interval. There will be appropriate wines or non-alcoholic drinks with snacks inspired by Mediaeval recipes, commissioned from Clarissa Dickson Wright by the Orlando Consort.

The award-winning Orlando Consort, founded in 1988, is one of Britain’s leading vocal groups specialising in Mediaeval and Renaissance music. It has performed at many of Britain’s festivals and has in recent years made numerous visits to France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, the USA and Canada, South America, Japan, Greece, Russia, Austria, Portugal and Spain. Its recording of the ‘Food, Wine & Song’ programme on Harmonia Mundi attracted much praise: ‘a highly attractive and instructive sweep through music of the Middle Ages … it may be their best CD yet’ (The Gramophone); ‘one to relish’ (The Independent).