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. 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.

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.

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.

A pre-concert talk by Peter Holman, Artistic Director of the Suffolk Villages Festival

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.

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.

Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and contains some of his best-loved music. It 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.