It’s been a while, but the Alternative History Quartet will make a rare UK appearance at the Iberian and Latin American Music Society’s Echoes Festival at London’s St Clement Danes church in Fleet Street on June 17th. The programme isn’t exactly as on the Festival site – we can’t do the Bryars, sadly,  as the players won’t have the right instruments – and the order may change, but otherwise it’s our usual mix of Renaissance music, early 20th century songs re-cast as early music, and more recent songs by rock musicians writing for a Renaissance ensemble. We begin with John Paul Jones’ Amores Pasados, settings of poems from the three great ages of Spanish literature,  originally composed for Red Byrd and Tragicomedia, which we have arranged for two voices and two lutes (as on our eponymous ECM album). There is an element of time travel in the motets by Victoria and Morales. We perform these in the transcriptions by Manuel de Falla, but as he might have expected to hear them if he were alive today (or, in our versions, if he were alive in early17th  century England). We last performed them at the de Falla festival in Cadiz.

There is more time travel in the Moeran, Dunhill and Warlock pieces, which are arrangements by Jacob Heringman, transcribed as though the early music movement had started in the 1920s, when composers setting Renaissance poetry might have used lutes instead of piano. In a similar spirit, we perform the songs given to us by Sting and Tony Banks as though they were songs by Dowland or Campion. The other new work is Peter Erskine’s incredibly moving setting of  Anne Hills’ ‘Ash and Snow’, reflecting on the human cost of current wars.   

Tickets are available here.