Saturday 20 August
Polstead
Village Hall, 11.00 a.m.
Pre-festival talk
by
Peter Holman, Artistic Director
preceded
by coffee at 10.30 a. m.
Friday 26
August
St
Mary’s Church, Stoke by Nayland, 8.00 p m.
(Please
note starting time)
Court, City, Country
A
Musical Tour of Britain 400 Years Ago
Claire Tomlin (soprano)
Jennie Cassidy (alto)
Patrick McCarthy (tenor)
Psalmody
SVF Consort of Viols
directed by Peter Holman
With composers such as William Byrd,
Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins at the height of their
powers, the reign of James I was a golden age for English
music. This programme is a musical tour of Britain,
starting at the court of Whitehall with some of the
sublime anthems written for the Chapel Royal, including
Gibbons’s ‘This is the record of John’ and
Tomkins’s ‘When David heard that Absalom was
slain’, written on the death of Prince Henry in 1613.
Travelling through the crowded and noisy streets of
London, where we hear extraordinary elaborations of
street cries by Richard Dering and Thomas Ravenscroft, we
visit Norfolk (Byrd’s elegy for a pet dog at
Appleton House), Scotland (an anthem for James’s
visit to Holyrood in 1617) and the West Country (Ravenscroft’s
vivid description of a rustic wedding). A high point of
the tour is Dering’s Country Cries, an evocation of
rustic life that includes farmyard animals, a swarm of
bees and a whistling carter.
Saturday 27
August
St
Mary’s Church, Polstead, 12.00 midday
If Music and Sweet
Poetry Agree
Shakespeare Sonnets and Lute Music by
Dowland, Holborne and Rosseter
Jack Edwards (reader) & Fred
Jacobs (lute)
Shakespeare’s sonnets,
published in 1609, contain some of the most complex and
beautiful explorations of life and love, all contained
within the 14-line form. Their jewel-like quality is
matched by contemporary lute music from the instrument’s
golden age. John Dowland was England’s greatest lute
composer, and was compared to Shakespeare at the time.
Anthony Holborne was a gentleman courtier popular for his
charming dances, while Philip Rosseter was a court
lutenist and manager of one of the companies of child
actors in Jacobean London.
Jack Edwards is a
distinguished actor and director, specialising in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is Artistic
Director of Opera Restor’d and has appeared many
times at the Suffolk Villages Festival. Fred Jacobs is
one of the most prominent lutenists in the Netherlands,
and has also appeared many times at the Festival, notably
in song recitals with Philippa Hyde.
St Mary’s Church, Stoke by Nayland, 7. 30 p.m.
John Stanley: Teraminta
soloists from Opera Restor’d
TERAMINTA . . . . . . . . Kate
Semmens (soprano)
ARDELIA . . . . . . Angela
Henckel (soprano)
XARINO . . . . . . . . Iestyn
Davies(countertenor)
CRATANDER . . . . . . . Daniel
Auchinloss (tenor)
GONZANES . . . . . . . . Eamonn
Dougan (bass)
Essex Baroque Orchestra
directed by Steven Devine
John Stanley (1712-1786) is mainly
known today for his instrumental music, but he also wrote
some fine large-scale vocal works, including the opera Teraminta,
to a libretto by Henry Carey, the author of ‘Sally
in our alley’. Stanley seems to have written it in
the early 1750s, but there is no record of a stage
production in the eighteenth century, and the only
revival seems to have been a BBC broadcast in the 1950s,
so we believe that this may be the first ever live
concert performance. Teraminta is set ‘in
Cuba and country adjacent’ and concerns a prince,
Xarino, who disguises himself as a shepherd to court the
shepherdess Teraminta. His friend Cratander becomes his
rival, but is eventually diverted towards Ardelia, who
has followed them into the country in disguise. The work
is essentially a miniature Handelian opera in English,
and is charming, powerful and affecting by turns, making
its neglect for 250 years all the more inexplicable.
Sunday 28
August
St
Mary’s Church, Boxford, 6.15 p. m.
Music at the Court of
Henry VIII
Pre-
concert talk by Dr Peter Holman, Artistic Director
St Mary’s Church, Boxford, 7.30 p. m.
Madame d'Amours
Music for the Six Wives of
Henry VIII
Jennie Cassidy (alto)
Musica Antiqua of London
directed by Philip Thorby
Henry VIII was probably the
most musical of English monarchs: he was an expert
singer, composed sacred and secular music, played various
instruments and patronised many distinguished foreign and
English musicians. His wives were also no mere observers
of music at Henry’s court, and maintained their own
household musicians. In chapel and chamber, whether
dancing, worshipping, singing, playing or listening,
music was an important counterpoint to the lives –
and sometimes deaths – of all of Henry’s wives,
from Catherine of Aragon to Catherine Parr.
In this new programme,
specially devised by Philip Thorby, Musica Antiqua play
the main types of instrument popular at Henry’s
court, including viols, recorders, shawms, bagpipes,
cornett, lutes and the virginals. They are joined for the
vocal items by Jennie Cassidy, a leading early music
singer and regular performer at the Suffolk Villages
Festival.
Monday 29August
St
James’s Church, Nayland, 12.00 midday
À Due Cembali
Music for Two Harpsichords by J.
S. Bach, Handel, and Johann Mattheson
Steven Devine & Colin
Booth (harpsichord)
In the early eighteenth
century a repertory of music for two harpsichords
developed in northern Germany, exploiting the large and
sonorous instruments made in that area at the time. J. S.
Bach’s great Concerto in C major BWV1061 is normally
played today with string accompaniment, though the
original version seems to have been for harpsichords
alone. In this programme it is contrasted with Handel’s
Suite in C minor HWV446, probably written in Hamburg in
about 1705, and the Suite in G minor by Handel’s
friend Johann Mattheson, written at about the same time
for his pupil Cyril Wich, the son of the English
ambassador in Hamburg.
The two harpsichords used in
this concert are copies of instruments by the Hamburg
maker Johann Christoph Fleischer and the Hanover maker
Christian Vater. They were made by Colin Booth, who
combines a career playing and teaching the harpsichord
with making instruments near Wells in Somerset. Steven
Devine plays and directs regularly at the Festival. He is
one of the foremost harpsichordists of the younger
generation, and spends much of his time directing
ensembles from the keyboard. Colin and Steven will
introduce the music and the instruments during the
concert.
St Mary’s Church, Hadleigh, 7.30 p.m.
Henry Purcell: The
Fairy Queen (1692)
Jack Edwards and Jane
Oakshott (readers)
vocal soloists to include:
Claire Tomlin & Kate
Semmens (soprano)
Timothy Travers-Brown (countertenor)
Daniel Auchinloss and
Patrick McCarthy (tenor)
Michael Bundy (bass)
Psalmody
Essex Baroque Orchestra
directed by Peter Holman
Henry Purcell’s Fairy
Queen is the third of the series of extravagant semi-operas
or musical plays he wrote for the Dorset Garden theatre
in London in the early 1690s. It is an adaptation of
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream,
with many added scenes for spectacular scenic effects and
operatic music. Purcell’s score contains some of his
best-loved music, including the Scene of the Drunken
Poet, the Masque of Night, Mystery, Secrecy and Sleep,
the song ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ and
the dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa. In this
performance the musical scenes are linked by a specially-devised
script, conveying the essence of the play.
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