Saturday 14th February 2026

2pm Tastar Di Corde Arngeir Hauksson (50min)
free concert (donations welcome)

4.30 pm Ancient Instruments - Meet and Greet hosted by Arngeir Hauksson & Blondel (45min)
free demonstration and Q & A session (donations welcome)

6.30pm Cover Story Blondel
ticketed performance (2 hours) scroll below for details

Drinks and Snacks will be available throughout the day 

Concert: Cover Story

Emily Baines —  William Brown —  Lizzie Gutteridge —  Belinda Paul

shawms, sackbut, recorders & bagpipes

£18/£14 under 12s free

Venue: Selly Oak Methodist Church, Langleys Road Birmingham B29 6HT

Date: Saturday 14th February 2026 6.30pm

 

What makes a song leap across national boundaries and language barriers, slip from the secular to the ecclesiastic, and remain at the top of the charts for more than 70 years? We don’t have the formula, but we know why these pieces wedged themselves into the cultural background of medieval Europe. The music is fabulous.

Cover Story tracks connections between people, places, texts and music. It follows the evolution of popular late medieval melodies across Europe as they are copied, rearranged and repurposed over years, and even decades.

Catchy dances and lyrical chansons, ingenious rounds and dazzling divisions by Machaut, Dufay, Bedyngham, Binchois, and many unnamed masters.

Inspired by the virtuosic wind players of the Middle Ages, Blondel bring their signature rousing blend of shawms and bagpipes, and introspective mix of recorders to Birmingham for the first time since 2020 

This project is partly funded by the Continuo Foundation. A further grant from Angel Early Music has enabled us to record this programme. The album will be released later this year