Cairn Ensemble
Under the greenwood tree

Cairn Ensemble takes listeners on a musical journey around the person of Shakespeare, comparing the English Renaissance (William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and John Dowland) and the early Baroque period (Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell) to the present day (Johannes Schöllhorn, Kaija Saariaho and Jonathan Bell). This perspective will give rise to re-writes and transcriptions, inventive ways of re-discovering the ancient melodies of Elizabethan England through the ears of our contemporaries. For this project, Cairn brought in soprano Léa Trommenschlager and French composer Jonathan Bell to re-write pieces by English Renaissance composers, specifically for this concert.