In The Witch Trials, Ellie Slorach and Kantos confront one of Britain’s darkest histories. Framed by spoken testimonies from the seventeenth-century Pendle trials in Lancashire, music by Byrd, Gesualdo, Allegri, Barbara Strozzi (arranged for the choir by Slorach herself) and Hildegard of Bingen stand beside new works by Rory Wainwright Johnston, Camden Reeves and Anna Disley-Simpson, creating a compelling dialogue across four centuries. Structured as a requiem for the accused, The Witch Trials explores fear, prejudice and the enduring persecution of women, balancing moments of extraordinary beauty with music of violent accusation and sometimes gleeful defiance. By placing masterpieces from the time face to face with powerful twenty-first-century responses, the programme reveals the unsettling persistence of these stories from four hundred years ago