The Marian Consort’s online recitals defy genre – and reveal the surprisingly bawdy background to a sixteenth-century Mass

Covid has upended every life and industry, but few as dramatically as music. Overnight in March song gave way to silence: music-making was outlawed, and across the country soloists and ensembles could only watch as their diaries emptied and their work disappeared.

But by the time lockdown eased, shock had given way to determination. Whether it’s staging opera in carparks or singing to audiences over Zoom, groups have found ways to make music outside traditional concert venues and formats, offering a glimpse of a new kind of music-making that changes not just where, but how, who and even why we listen.

Leading the way in this new landscape is the Marian Consort and its musical director, Rory McCleery, whose genre-defying series of films on sacred music offer something beyond just a digital recital. “What’s wonderful with this project,” McCleery explains, “is that we’re able to draw out the context, background and meaning of music – whether that’s with experts, actors or audio-visual elements – in a way that’s a lot harder in a concert. The modern view of renaissance polyphony has been somewhat whitewashed over the years. People don’t appreciate – or sometimes actively don’t want to know – the origins of works they enjoy for their abstract beauty and supposed purity.”