A pre-Festival talk by Peter Holman, Artistic Director

A pre-concert talk by Hugh Belsey

Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s miniature opera Actéon, with its intense, dramatic and poignant music, was probably written in Paris in the spring of 1684. Charpentier is traditionally said to have studied in Rome with Giacomo Carissimi, so it is appropriate that we pair Actéon with Carissimi’s great oratorio Jephte. The concert also includes two miniature masterpieces by Monteverdi, the ballet ‘Movete’, and the poignant ‘Lamento della Ninfa’.

Heinrich Biber wrote his Rosary or Mystery Sonatas in Salzburg in the 1670s. The sonatas are famous for their beauty, for the fearsome virtuosity required, and for their use of scordatura – the deliberate mistuning of the violin to alter its sonority and to facilitate the playing of chords.

In this concert we bring together eighteenth-century works telling the tragic stories of three betrayed women of Classical history and legend. Handel’s dramatic cantata ‘Armida abbandonata’, his ‘Agrippina condotta a morire’, and Haydn’s cantata Arianna auf Naxos. The concert is completed by three related instrumental works: the overtures to Handel’s operas Agrippina and Rinaldo, and the poignant concerto Il pianto d’Arianna op. 7, no. 6 by Pietro Antonio Locatelli.

This programme brings together some of the masterpieces of Baroque chamber music, including trio sonatas by Corelli, J.S. Bach and Handel. Our festival theme is reflected in a rare complete performance of François Couperin’s great Apothéose de Lully.

In this programme we explore the world of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century trouvères, the poet-musicians who developed and popularised the concept of courtly love in northern France.

Bach wrote Hercules auf dem Scheidewege (Hercules at the Crossroads) for the birthday of the Crown Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony. He reused much of the music in the Christmas Oratorio, though there are some intriguing differences between the two versions. Handel wrote The Choice of Hercules HWV69 for a performance at the Covent Garden theatre in 1751. He had written some of the music, including Hercules’s beautiful air ‘Yet, can I hear that dulcet lay’, the previous year as incidental music for Tobias Smollett’s unperformed play Alceste.