Spies at the Beverley & East Riding Early Music Festival
A large-scale digital installation will take over Beverley Minster both visually and audibly this May and June, as part of the 30th anniversary celebrations of the Beverley & East Riding Early Music Festival.
From Friday 26 May – Sunday 16 July, Through the Looking Glass is a seven-week long art exhibition that brings to life the work of 16th century German-Dutch Petrus Alamire, musical scribe, composer, singer and spy in the court of Henry VIII.
Speculum Musurgica by Flemish visual and music artist Rudi Knoops, is the centerpiece to the exhibition, a heptagonal media installation comprised of large-scale mirror structures and sound projections, inviting visitors to walk in and around them, as the physical choirbooks of Alamire would have done.
The exhibition opens on Friday 26 May and acts as the launch for the four-day festival, which fills the historic Yorkshire market town of Beverley and its fine buildings, featuring early music performances from the internationally acclaimed The Tallis Scholars, in addition to a programme including a unique work created by hundreds of primary school children, 6ft recorders and puppets and a concert drama imagining the last testimony of 16th century composer and murderer, Carlo Gesualdo, in Breaking the Rules.
The exhibition is supported by The Alamire Foundation and VisitFlanders and arrives from Antwerp Cathedral before heading off on a pan-European tour and ending in New York.
