The Marian Consort
Wigmore Hall, London

What is it about the face of a Renaissance Madonna that captivates us? Is it the sense of divinity, of other-world-liness – the impossible smoothness of skin, the elongated fingers and widened eyes, the gilded halo? Or is it precisely the reverse? The artists who get to the heart of the matter, who move us most today – Raphael, Bellini, Fra Angelico – are surely those who find the humanity, the familiarity in their subject, giving us a woman who is at once queen and servant, saint and mother.

It’s the same in music. The Marian motets and anthems that endure are those rooted in something of earth, the grit of human existence: loss, grief, ecstasy, love. All these emotions and more were spread out across five centuries of English repertoire in the Marian Consort’s Wigmore Hall recital (25 November).