BREMF – POLYPHONY CRAWL – BREMF Consort of Voices, James Elias (Director)

The Brighton Early Music Festival 2026 has begun with its customary wake up call: BREMF CofV singing a delectable and free concert repeated around four Brighton churches. The Polyphony Crawl aims to introduce Early Music to a wider audience and this plan seems to be working. The twenty-minute programme is short enough not to discourage the casual visitor but also varied and stimulating enough to delight the regular BREMF aficionados. These enthusiasts are as varied a bunch as the music they enjoy. Their numbers are growing with each season. Insightful programming has carefully developed their taste for all kinds of Early Music, and they’re fast becoming keen devotees of a vast array of composers, styles and performance practice, over many hundreds of years and from all around Europe and beyond.

Now I’ve praised the quality of tone, precision of pitch and generally superb musicality of this excellent choir many times, and bluntly that is a given these days, unless something is awfully wrong – well, halfway through the St Paul’s concert there was a terrible sound and it is to the great credit of the singers that it didn’t disrupt their concentration. Somewhere behind their serene polyphonic tones emerged a persistent wrong note, a drone or ugly traffic groan. It grew louder – drums and chanting, a march down West Street perhaps, a rowdy protest for the Liberal Party Conference in the nearby Brighton Centre? Well, apparently it was ‘music’ loudly expressing from an event in the Wagner Hall, North of the church, and the doors into the Vicarage garden must have been open. The BREMF CofV were obviously surprised but carried on without allowing it to affect the quality of their performance. That is a sign of a very confident ensemble, able to keep with the conductor, stay in tune and retain the balance between themselves, whatever distractions occur around them. It added an extra layer of meaning to the concert’s glorious finale: ‘Alleluia. I heard a voice’. Bravo!

Andrew Connal
St Paul’s Church (& St Luke’s Queens’s Park, Holy Cross Woodingdean, St Margaret’s Rottingdean)
19 September 2026

Rating:

BREMF Consort of Voices
James Elias – Director

Programme:
Antoine Bunois – Alleluia. Verbum caro factum est
John Dowland – Flow, my tears
Heinrich Isaac – Quis dabit capiti meo aquam
Philippe Verdelot – Ultimi miei sospiri
Claudin de Sermisi – Auprès de vous
Johannes Ockeghem – Alma redemptoris mater
Thomas Weelkes – Alleluia. I heard a voice