Birmingham’s St Chad’s Cathedral hosts a special concert featuring Birmingham Bach Choir on Saturday 14 March.

Entitled Sacred Music, the performance is presented in the run-up to Holy Week and is built around a trio of larger-scale works by three leading 16th century composers: Italian Carlo Gesualdo (Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday), the Franco-Flemish Dominique Phinot (Incipit oratio Jeremiae prophetae), and Thomas Tallis (Lamentations of Jeremiah) - widely regarded as one of England's greatest composers.

Around these moving pieces are a series of shorter choral works dating from broadly the same period - Orlando Gibbons' Drop, Drop Slow Tears, William Byrd's Miserere Mei, Tomás Luis de Victoria's O vos omnes and Tallis' Salvator Mundi - alongside Baroque composer Antonio Lotti's Crucifixus, his most famous work.

The choral masterpieces are accompanied by complementary readings by His Grace, the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley.

Designed by celebrated Gothic Revival architect Augustus Welby Pugin, St Chad's was the first English Catholic cathedral to be built for 300 years following the Reformation. Consecrated in 1841, the Grade II* listed, the cathedral is home to the relics of St Chad, which were originally interred in a shrine at Lichfield Cathedral in 672 AD.

Paul Spicer, Birmingham Bach Choir's Musical Conductor, said: "This promises to be a truly moving evening."

His Grace, the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley, added: “This concert of scared music is a wonderfully imaginative way to mark the season of Lent and as we reflect on the Passion of Christ.”

Birmingham Bach Choir: Sacred Music is at St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham, on Saturday 14 March 2026. For more information, see: birmingham.bachchoir.com