Vox Luminis and Lionel Meunier give Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine at Wigmore Hall on Sunday 20 September 2026.
Vox Luminis is a Belgian ensemble built on a principle rather than a size: one singer to a part, with continuo, so that everything in the texture stays audible and no singer can hide inside a section. Lionel Meunier founded it and directs it from within the singers rather than from a podium. It gives around seventy concerts a year, and its Schütz Musicalische Exequien and Buxtehude Abendmusiken recordings each took the leading award in their category, in 2012 and 2019.
Monteverdi published the Vespro della Beata Vergine in 1610 and it is the strangest great work of its century: the Latin office of evening prayer set twice over, in the old church polyphony and in the new Italian style with its soloists and echoes and violins, bound into a single sequence. Nobody is certain whether he meant it to be performed whole. It survives in a 1610 print that Monteverdi dedicated to the Pope while looking for a job, bundled with a mass in the old style, which is part of why its shape has been argued over ever since.
They bring it to Wigmore Hall on Sunday 20 September 2026, directed by Meunier, with period instrumentalists. One voice to a part is a considerably smaller sound than the massed choirs the Vespers usually get, and it is the only reason a work of this scale can be given in a recital room at all.