Pre-concert talk by Dr Bryan White
Lecturer in Music, University of Leeds

This performance aims to recreate the work as it might have sounded at its first court performance, shedding fascinating new light on Purcell’s matchless opera.

Gustav Leonhardt is probably the most famous harpsichordist in the world today. He has been interested in the great repertory of English keyboard music for many years, and his recital includes music by William Byrd, John Bull, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tomkins, Henry Purcell and William Croft. He plays a copy by Malcolm Rose of the earliest surviving English harpsichord, made by Lodewijk Theeus in 1579.

Crispian Steele-Perkins makes a welcome return to the festival with a programme of English music for trumpet and orchestra. He plays Henry Purcell’s suite from the play Bonduca, the trumpet overture from Purcell’s Indian Queen, the overture to Handel’s opera Atalanta, and a fine trumpet concerto by the Coventry composer Capel Bond, published in 1766. The programme also includes works from Handel’s great set of concerti grossi op. 6, as well as keyboard concertos by John Stanley and Thomas Arne, played by David Wright on an original Kirckman harpsichord of 1778.

English sacred music in the fifteenth century is as distinctive and uplifting as the soaring Mediaeval churches for which it was written. In this programme the Orlando Consort explores music written during the reigns of Henry V, Henry VI and Edward IV, focusing on John Dunstable and his followers, including John Pyamour, Forest, Bittering, Walter Lambe, and the ever-present Anon.

Dr Susan Sloman is an authority on English eighteenth-century art and is the author of Gainsborough in Bath, published in 2002 by Yale University Press. There are a limited number seats; early booking is recommended.

In this entertainment Gainsborough’s world is evoked though his vivid letters and the anecdotes of his friends and acquaintances. The music includes bass viol pieces by Abel, the greatest exponent of the instrument of the time, and lute music by Rudolf Straube, a pupil of J.S. Bach who settled in London. Some of it was composed for Gainsborough or comes from manuscripts once owned by him.

This programme uses enlarged versions of our resident choir and orchestra to recreate the grand musical effects created in Westminster Abbey during the coronation service, which used most of the professional singers and instrumentalists in London.