Events Diary and Details for
Winter Concert Series
2004 - 2005

St James Church, Nayland

Sunday 12 December 2004

8.15 pm

St Mary's Church, Boxford

Handel: Messiah Part I

6.00 pm

For concert details click links or scroll down

Friday 31 October 2004

St James’s Church, Nayland, 6.00 p m.

(Please note starting time)

Silete Venti

Claire Tomlin (soprano), Joel Raymond (oboe), Sally Holman (bassoon),

Essex Baroque Orchestra

directed by Peter Holman

Handel’s dramatic and sensuous motet ‘Silete venti’ is one of his greatest pieces of Latin sacred music, and yet it was written in London in the 1720s probably for concert performance rather than for the Catholic church.  In this concert it is contrasted with music by Handel’s English contemporaries, including string concertos by John Stanley and William Boyce, a bassoon concerto by John Humphries and an oboe concerto by the great Italian oboist Giuseppe Sammartini, who settled in London in the 1720s and was a star performer in Handel’s opera orchestra.  The concert also includes the first modern performance of the orchestral version of Thomas Arne’s witty cantata Cymon and Iphigenia, recently discovered in Birmingham.

Claire Tomlin has been appearing at the Suffolk Villages Festival since she was a student, and is now much in demand as a solo and consort singer with such groups as the Monteverdi Choir and Ex Cathedra.  Joel Raymond and Sally Holman play regularly in Essex Baroque Orchestra and are outstanding period-instrument specialists of the younger generation.

SUNDAY 12 DECEMBER 2004

St Mary’s Church, Boxford, 6.00 pm

Handel: Messiah Part I

and Georgian Christmas music

Soloists to include Claire Tomlin (soprano), Janet Bullard (alto),

Patrick McCarthy (tenor) and Eamonn Dougan (baritone)

Psalmody

Essex Baroque Orchestra

directed by Peter Holman

Handel’s Messiah has always been associated with Christmas because its first part is concerned with prophecies foretelling the birth of Jesus with the narrative of the Christmas story.  In the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries English composers often took favourite sections from the work as the starting point for their own Christmas hymns and anthems.  In this concert a complete performance of Messiah Part I is contrasted with works inspired in various ways by Messiah, including the striking anthem ‘The people that walked in darkness’ (1790) by John Hill of Rugby and the delightful ‘How beauteous are their feet’ (1817) by William Matthews of Nottingham.  The concert will conclude with a rare performance of Handel’s anthem ‘How beautiful are the feet’, written for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1749 and incorporating reworked versions of several movements from Messiah.

Some of the music in this concert is featured on Psalmody’s latest Christmas CD Nativity (Hyperion CDA67443), which was released last Christmas to great acclaim; International Record Review called it ‘rasping, rousing and riveting’.

SUNDAY 6 MARCH 2005

St. Mary’s Church, Boxford, 6.00 pm

Orazio Vecchi: L’Amfiparnaso (1597)

with madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi and Thomas Tomkins

I Fagiolini

directed by Robert Hollingsworth

L’Amfiparnaso (‘The Twin Peaks of Mount Parnassus’ – that is, the union of music and comedy) is the best-known and greatest madrigal comedy of the Italian Renaissance.  Set in Venice, it is a cycle of madrigals that explores the zany world of the commedia dell’arte, featuring a pair of unhappy lovers, scheming old rogues and their cheeky servants (the zanni) who turn the best-laid intrigues on their heads.  In this highly dramatic performance, Vecchi’s comedy is contrasted with serious madrigals of love, passion and despair by Claudio Monteverdi and his great English contemporary Thomas Tomkins.

I Fagiolini is one of Britain’s leading vocal ensembles. Its staged productions of Renaissance masques and music-theatre works have made friends from the BBC Proms to Soweto, and have brought its repertoire to completely new audiences.

‘vivid performances … hammed up just enough to be proper carnivalesque, but never so much that the music gets lost.’  The Times

‘uncompromised musicianship was coupled with an unbounded joy in brilliant caricature.’ Frankfurter Rundschau

MONDAY 30 MAY 2005

St Mary’s Church, Hadleigh, 6.00 pm

A Portrait of Samuel Wesley

Philippa Hyde & Claire Tomlin (soprano), Patrick McCarthy (tenor), Eamonn Dougan (baritone)

Psalmody

Essex Baroque Orchestra

directed by Peter Holman

Samuel Wesley (1766-1837) was the son of Charles Wesley the hymn writer and the nephew of John Wesley the evangelist.  He was a musical prodigy to rival Mozart, and developed as an adult into by far the most important English contemporary of Beethoven.  This concert brings together three major works that reveal his musical preoccupations.  His remarkable Symphony in Bb (1802) is the only English symphony that can stand comparison with Haydn’s London symphonies, while the delightful ‘Ave maris stella’ (1786) is scored for two sopranos and strings and reflects his interest in Roman Catholic church music and, in particular, the music of Pergolesi and other Neapolitan composers.  Wesley thought the ‘Confitebor tibi Domine’ (1799), a setting of Psalm 110, his finest work.  In its creative fusion of the Baroque choral idiom with the modern Classical style, it is a worthy companion to Haydn’s Creation, written a year or two earlier.

Peter Holman is internationally known as a champion of unfamiliar English music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  His series of recordings in the English Orpheus series on Hyperion Records have been universally praised and have led to a critical reappraisal of the ‘dark age’ of English musical history.