Details

Four hundred years to the very day that Guy Fawkes was captured just as he was about to light the blue touch paper beneath the Houses of Parliament, his home-town band provides a unique soundtrack to his explosive life and times. Fawkes was born in York in 1570 and 35 years later, as the technician for the 'Powder Treason', he became its most notorious citizen, branded 'the great devil of them all'. Today's York Waits, best known for their regular Christmas concerts at Square Chapel, recreate the sight and the sound of the civic band as it was at the time of Guy Fawkes. The concert will include popular music of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England played on instruments such as shawms, sackbut, hurdy gurdy, violin, harp, lute, bagpipes and recorders. Numbers will include lively dances and mournful ballads plus compositions by leading composers of the period such as Byrd and Dowland.