Love and nature are in full bloom in this programme of evocative imagery and shimmering harmony.

Selections from Claude Le Jeune’s innovative 16th-century Le printemps set spring as the season of love, while the transient beauty of nature and youth is explored in Eric Whitacre’s Three Flower Songs. Love and longing is the timeless subject for Palestrina - a giant of the Italian Renaissance - and for Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, who brings impressionistic colour and intimacy to his choral masterpiece.

Hear Ex Cathedra’s talented 2025-26 cohort of Scholars, including the second performance of a work specially commissioned from Bobbie-Jane Gardner.

Programme includes:

Daniel-Lesur Le Cantique des cantiques

Gardner New Work (world premiere)

Le Jeune Le printemps

Palestrina Surge, propera, amica mea

Whitacre Three Flower Songs

Please note the date and venue of this concert to avoid confusion with the CBSO Centre performance.

Ex Cathedra would like to thank the Hinrichsen Foundation for supporting the new work from Bobbie-Jane Gardner.

Ex Cathedra is a B:Music Associate Artist.

Jeffrey Skidmore writes:

"Ex Cathedra Scholars continue to be very active. Their Valentine’s Day concert in February 2025 - Chansons d’amour - was a great success, and their performance at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards ceremony at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in March 2025 was described as ‘a class act’. On 18 July 2025 in St Paul’s Church in the Jewellery Quarter they performed a diverse programme of choral music from around the world - The Language of Baroque - as part of the International Conference of Baroque Music that brought the world’s leading musicologists to Birmingham.

"The Garden of Love celebrates spring and the season of beauty and love with a programme of ravishing music to delight the senses, with music by Palestrina, Le Jeune, Daniel-Lesur, and Eric Whitacre - a Grand Tour of earthly delights"