The Renaissance Players
The Renaissance Players bring medieval Iberian song and dance to life with shawms, rebecs, harps and voices that favour energy over reverence. Directed by Winsome Evans, they reconstruct pilgrim songs and the Cantigas de Santa Maria as living performance.
Their Tall Poppies discs turn on the Llibre Vermell’s Catalan pilgrim songs and further chapters of Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria. Evans rebuilds monophonic dance songs with varied scoring and instrumental colour rather than as fixed museum texts. Sacred and secular sit side by side: Marian devotion next to circle dances with simple, catchy structures. Voices move between trained choristers and earthier, Moorish-tinged delivery. The band fields shawms, gemshorn, gittern, rebec and percussion with a joyful, sometimes improvisatory edge that keeps the past sounding present.
The Renaissance Players is featured on the following titles
Gabriel's Message: Cantigas de Santa Maria, Vol. V
The Renaissance Players, directed by Winsome Evans, was founded 48 years ago at the University of Sydney. It has a nucleus of nine to ten musicians (singers and instrumentalists), varied according to the needs of particular performances.
Cantigas de Santa Maria IV: Pillar of Wisdom
The Renaissance Players, directed by Winsome Evans, was founded in 1966 at the University of Sydney. A flexible nucleus of nine or ten singers and instrumentalists is shaped to each programme.
Pilgrimage to Montserrat
The Renaissance Players, directed by Winsome Evans, was founded in Sydney in the mid-1960s. A nucleus of nine to ten singers and instrumentalists expands or contracts to suit each programme.