2026 SEASON

Celebrating Leeds 400 

Sunday 28 June | 3:00pm 

The Old Woollen, Sunny Bank Mills LS28 5UJ 

Peter Holman director

A programme of musical scenes from plays put on in London during the Restoration period. We feature music from The Tempest, including the Masque of Devils from Thomas Shadwell’s spectacular operatic version, with music by Matthew Locke, Pelham Humfrey and others, and songs from the early eighteenth-century setting by John Weldon, long attributed to Henry Purcell. There will also be music by Louis Grabu, John Eccles and Purcell, including the rarely performed Temple Scene from Bonduca (1695) and the hilarious Poet’s Scene from The Fairy Queen (1692). Celebrating Leeds 400, we include pieces from a manuscript of Restoration theatre music now in Leeds City Library.

Sunday 15 November | 3:00pm 

Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall 

University of Leeds LS2 9JT 

Leeds Baroque Choir & Orchestra 

Peter Holman director

We celebrate our founder Peter Holman’s 80th birthday with a programme of ceremonial music from the seventeenth and eighteenth-century English court. Seventeenth-century state occasions are represented by Matthew Locke’s great polychoral anthem ‘Be thou exalted, Lord’, written in 1666 to celebrate a victory over the Dutch, and the two matching anthems written for James II’s coronation in 1685, John Blow’s ‘God spake sometime in visions’ and Henry Purcell’s ‘My heart is inditing’. Eighteenth-century coronations are

represented by Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ and ‘My heart is inditing’ (George II, 1727) and anthems by William Boyce (George III, 1761). By contrast, we include William Croft’s moving Burial Service, used at every state funeral since the early eighteenth century.