Jacob Obrecht: ‘Scaramella’ (Whitekirk)

Part of the Lammermuir Festival

Whitekirk’s beautiful church dates mostly from a rebuild in the mid-15th centuryaround the time of Jacob Obrecht’s birth. The great Flemish musician would go on to be the most important composer of masses later that century. The popular 15th-century song Scaramella, about a Baldrick-like itinerant soldier, found its way into many sacred works of the time, but was also set by some of Obrecht’s contemporaries as a secular madrigal. The Binchois Consort’s programme centres on Fabrice Fitch’s extraordinary reconstruction of Obrecht’s superb Missa Scaramella and introduces music by Obrecht’s contemporaries with a modern motet by Fitch himself.