Formed in 1988 by the Early Music Network of Great Britain, The Orlando Consort rapidly achieved a reputation as one of Europe’s most expert and consistently challenging groups performing repertoire from the years 1050 to 1550. Their work successfully combined captivating entertainment and fresh scholarly insight; the unique imagination and originality of their programming together with their superb vocal skills marked out the Consort as the outstanding leader of their field.

The Orlando Consort performed at many of Britain’s top festivals (including the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival) and toured in France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, the USA and Canada, South America, Singapore, Japan, Greece, Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The Consort’s impressive discography includes a collection of music by John Dunstaple and ‘The Call of the Phoenix’, which were selected as Early Music CDs of the Year by Gramophone in 1996 and 2003 respectively; their albums of music by Compère, Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, ‘Popes and Anti-Popes’, ‘Saracen and Dove’ and ‘Passion’ were all also shortlisted. Their 2008 release of Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame and Scattered Rhymes, an outstanding work by the British composer Tarik O’Regan and featuring the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, was shortlisted for a BBC Music Magazine award. Of their series of recordings for Hyperion exploring the polyphonic songs of Guillaume de Machaut, the first release (‘Le Voir Dit’) was selected by The New York Times critics as one of their favourite recordings of 2013 and was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award, as were the fourth and eighth titles in the series (‘Sovereign Beauty’ and ‘The lion of nobility’) and their anthologies of music by Loyset Compère and Guillaume Dufay.

The Consort’s performances also embraced the spheres of contemporary music and improvisation: they performed over thirty premieres and created striking collaborations with the jazz group Perfect Houseplants and, for a project exploring historic Portuguese and Goan music, the brilliant tabla player Kuljit Bhamra. A grand project presenting Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc with a live soundtrack of music composed during the lifetime of Joan of Arc was presented seventy times across Europe and the USA, with the fiftieth performance taking place at the Salzburg Festival in 2018.

The Consort presented its farewell concert at the 2023 Boston Early Music Festival, and this final album, ‘A lover’s death’, represents the fulfilment of the group’s long-standing ambition to record the complete polyphonic works of Guillaume de Machaut.