Libby McDonnell Costume Design Peter Rubie Lighting Design … · JOHN DOWLAND (1563-1626) is now...

ENGLISH BAROQUE WITH CIRCA 1

CHAIRMAN’S 11Proudly supporting our guest artists.

Concert duration approximately 90 minutes with no interval. Please note concert duration is approximate only and is subject to change.

We kindly request that you switch off all electronic devices during the performance.

2019 CANBERRA INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL Llewellyn Hall

Thursday 2 May 7:30pm SYDNEY City Recital Hall Wednesday 8 May 7:00pm Friday 10 May 7:00pm Saturday 11 May 2:00pm Saturday 11 May 7:00pm Wednesday 15 May 7:00pm Friday 17 May 7:00pm

MELBOURNEMelbourne Recital CentreSaturday 18 May 7:00pm Sunday 19 May 5:00pm BRISBANE QPAC Tuesday 21 May 7:30pm

CREATIVE TEAM

Paul Dyer AO Artistic Director Yaron Lifschitz Artistic Director, Circa Benjamin Knapton Associate Director Libby McDonnell Costume Design Peter Rubie Lighting Design Yaron Lifschitz, Libby McDonnell, Richard Clarke Set Design

This Production premiered on 2 May 2019 at Llewellyn Hall as part of the Canberra International Music Festival.

A Baroque wig: Paul Dyer’s first inspiration image for the series.

Magical Spell of the Night

English Baroque with Circa

PRELUDE

Alex Palmer English Overture

SCENE ONE – THE COURT

Henry Purcell Curtain Tune from Timon of Athens, Z 632

John Dowland Behold a Wonder Here from The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires

Henry Purcell Overture from King Arthur, Z 628

Henry Purcell Aire from King Arthur, Act II, Z 628

Henry Purcell Hornpipe from King Arthur, Act III, Z 628

Henry Purcell How Blest are Shepherds from King Arthur, Act II, Z 628

Henry Purcell 3 Parts Upon a Ground, Z 731

SCENE TWO – THE BEDROOM

Henry Purcell Overture in C minor, Air in C minor, The Triumphing Dance from Dido & Aeneas, Z 626

Henry Purcell Ritornelle in D minor, Thanks to these lonesome vales, Dance in D minor from Dido & Aeneas, Z 626

George Frideric Handel Gentle Morpheus, son of night from Alceste, HWV 45

SCENE THREE – THE CHAPEL

Arcangelo Corelli Concerto grosso in D major, Op. 6, No. 4: Adagio, Allegro

George Frideric Handel De torrente in via from Dixit Dominus, HWV 232

George Frideric Handel Organ concerto in G minor, Op. 4, No. 3, HWV 291: Adagio

SCENE FOUR – THE FAIRGROUND

Nicola Matteis Ground after the Scotch Humour

Traditional (arr. Alex Palmer) Scarborough Fair

Traditional Wallom Green

Henry Purcell Curtain Tune from Timon of Athens, Z 632

Traditional (arr. Alex Palmer) The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby

Traditional Hole in the Wall

Traditional The Virgin Queen

Traditional An Italian Rant

Traditional Paul’s Steeple


14 AUSTRALIAN BRANDENBURG ORCHESTRA

v3

Elevation Render

CRH Sydney

1:50 @ A3

English Baroque

Set Design


Costume Design

Facsimile of lute tablature from an original copy of Dowland’s Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires


Scene One — The CourtProgram Notes

HENRY PURCELL (1659-1695) was the greatest English composer of the Baroque era. He was born into a family of professional musicians, and from the age of seven or eight his uncle arranged for him to be trained as a chorister in the Chapel Royal, where from 1674 he would study under the direction of another great English composer, John Blow. In 1677, when he was eighteen, Purcell was appointed ‘composer in ordinary’ for King Charles II’s string orchestra, the ‘Twenty-Four Violins’. Further royal appointments followed including organist at Westminster Abbey in 1679, a position he would hold for the rest of his life.

During the 1680s Purcell was fully occupied with composing anthems and sacred works for the Chapel Royal and various kinds of ceremonial music for the courts of Charles II and his brother James II. The more austere reign of William and Mary which followed saw a decline in royal patronage of music, and the court lost its place as the centre of musical life in London. While Purcell remained on the court payroll as one of the forty ‘musicians for the private music’, the focus of his writing became the public theatres in London.

From 1690 to 1695 he composed music for nearly fifty plays. Some of them, such as The Fairy Queen and King Arthur, contain so much music that they were called semi-operas, however no fully sung work was heard on the London public stage until the introduction of Italian opera early in the next century. Combining music, dialogue, and dance was a long-held tradition in the English theatre, catering to an audience who wanted plenty of music but not ‘that perpetual singing’ as opera was described by The Gentleman’s Journal in 1692. Opera took much longer to capture popular taste in England than in continental Europe and did not become established until the arrival of Handel in London in the 1710s.

Even then, it was predominantly a pastime for the wealthy upper classes. Plays, on the other hand, attracted people from all walks of life (King Charles II was a regular attendee).

The music did not drive the action, and often served purely to entertain or divert the audience’s attention during elaborate scene changes which occurred in full view of the audience. A ‘curtain tune’, such as the ‘Curtain Tune on a Ground’ from Timon of Athens, was played while the curtain was being raised directly after the overture. A ground is a short repeating melody in the bass of a composition, on which successive variations were based. This simple device allowed composers infinite scope for melodic and rhythmic variation, as we can hear in the edgy dissonances and extraordinary chromaticism over the relentless, angular ground bass.

JOHN DOWLAND (1563-1626) is now regarded as the finest English composer of lute music and lute songs, and in his own time he was one of the most famous players in Europe. His talent went unrecognised by the English court until the final years of his life, partly because he was associated with a circle of English Catholics in Italy who were suspected of treason. ‘Behold a wonder here’ comes from The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires (pictured left), and is thought to be part of an entertainment bythe Earl of Essex for Queen Elizabeth I. Dowland was able to match poetry to music so precisely that many of his songs are considered masterpieces in miniature.

Before the Comedy begins, that the audience may not be tired with waiting, the most delightful symphonies are played; on which account many persons come early to enjoy this agreeable amusement.”LORENZO MAGALOTTI 1669

“


King Arthur was Purcell’s most successful stage work and was often revived during the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. Its overture has a slow majestic opening section followed by a lively Allegro. Like all overtures of this period, it does not introduce any musical ideas to be heard later on in the play. Spectacle was an integral part of every show, and as mechanical devices became more and more ingenious, incidental music was needed to fill in the time needed to manually operate the stage machinery. The ‘Air’ from the second act, for example, was “played while Merlin [a wizard] descends in a Chariot drawn by Dragons” according to the stage directions written in the script. Songs and dances, like the cheerful ‘Hornpipe’ from Act III, based on an English country dance, and the pastoral ‘How Blest are Shepherds’ from Act II, enhanced the mood of a particular scene but had little to do directly with the plot. Although it had a serious sub-text (English patriotism), King Arthur was meant to be pure entertainment, and it was full of double-entendres, bawdiness, flashy special effects, and rollicking and affecting music.

In 1694 Purcell wrote that “Composing upon a Ground’ was ‘a very easie thing to do, and requires but little Judgement …[however] to maintain Fuges upon it would be difficult”. Three parts upon a Ground is exactly this, a virtuosic example of ‘Composing upon a Ground’. Commonly ‘divisions’ or ‘variations’ on a ground were for one instrument, but as the title suggests this is for three solo instruments. The ground bass in this piece consists of only six notes repeated twenty-eight times, over which the three violins play increasingly complex variations.

Purcell’s music is effortlessly melodic, his part-writing always interesting, with a characteristic juxtaposition of the poignant and the witty. At one moment his music is full of startling harmonic changes and daring chromaticism, at another breezy and tuneful. French influences can be heard in his gay and elegant melodies, however his later instrumental music bears traces of the new Italian style then becoming fashionable throughout Europe. Above all, Purcell was an idiosyncratic and highly original composer who followed his own style.

Purcell died at the age of only thirty-six, probably due to tuberculosis, and not as a result of being locked out of his house in the pouring rain by his wife after he came home late, as some have suggested.

His death was announced in a London newspaper as that of “Mr Henry Pursel one of the most Celebrated Masters of the Science of Musick in the Kingdom, and scarce Inferior to any in Europe’’. He was buried in Westminster Abbey – the funeral music was the work he had composed for the funeral of Queen Mary earlier in the year. His epitaph reads

Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq. who left this Life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only his Harmony can be exceeded.”

“

Scene One — The CourtProgram Notes


Scene Two — The BedroomProgram Notes

Dido and Aeneas is an anomaly among Purcell’s works as it is his only true opera, with no spoken text. The most famous of his works today, surprisingly little is known about why, or for whom it was written. It is known to have been performed privately at a ‘Boarding-School at CHELSEY, by young gentlewomen’ in 1689, but it is possible that it was performed earlier at the court of King Charles II. This would explain why the opera contains parts for men.

Dido and Aeneas is a work of unsurpassed pathos and concision. It tells the story of Dido, legendary Queen of Carthage, who is in love with the Trojan hero Aeneas, mythical founder of Rome. The malevolent Sorceress and her accomplices, two witches, conjure up a storm to trick Aeneas into leaving, and the opera ends with Dido dying of grief. All this is achieved in a series of very short scenes (the opera is only about an hour long) and displays Purcell’s absolute mastery in setting the English language to music and his ability to immediately establish emotion and character.

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL (1685–1759) was one of the most famous and successful opera composers in the Baroque period, and he wrote forty-two Italian operas in all, including Alcina and Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar). He also produced an enormous number of works in every musical genre of his time, however his work on Alceste was the only occasion when he wrote music for the theatre other than opera. For reasons that are not entirely clear but probably financial, Handel agreed to compose the incidental music for the play Alceste by the writer Tobias Smollett which was to be staged at Covent Garden early in 1750. Handel composed a substantial amount of music, and even re-wrote some of it, so that the beautiful aria ‘Gentle Morpheus, son of night exists’ in two versions. In the end, however, the play was never performed. Not one to let good work go to waste, Handel re-used the music in some of his later oratorios including The Choice of Hercules.


Scene Three — The ChapelProgram Notes

By the age of only twenty-three, ARCANGELO CORELLI (1653-1713) was already one of Rome’s foremost violinists. His playing was described as ‘learned, elegant and pathetic,’ although it could also be intense: one witness commented that when he played he appeared ‘half mad’ and that ‘it was usual for his countenance to be distorted, his eyes to become as red as fire, and his eyeballs to roll as if in an agony.’ Corelli’s six published volumes of trio sonatas and concertos were enormously influential across Europe for many years after his death, and in England his works developed almost a cult following among professional and amateur musicians. His compositions and compositional style were much imitated, often without acknowledgement; indeed, nine trio sonatas published in 1730 as ‘Corelli’s Opus 7’ were not by Corelli at all.

Corelli’s landmark Opus 6 set of twelve concerti grossi was published posthumously in 1714. Corelli’s concerti grossi were written for festivals in Rome for which huge orchestras of sometimes more than one hundred players were assembled. Contemporary accounts indicate that Corelli was an exacting orchestra leader: he insisted not only on accuracy of pitch but that the bows of all players should synchronise exactly with each other. Corelli composed slowly, polishing and revising his works until he considered them fit for publication. The first movement of Concerto No. 4 opens with a very short slow introduction, followed by a lengthy fugal Allegro, in which two solo violins continually chase the melody between them, with the occasional interjection by the accompanying instruments.

Handel grew up in the German city of Halle and moved to Hamburg in 1703 where he played violin in the opera orchestra and where his first operas were performed. When he was twenty-one he travelled to Italy and spent four years there, working as a composer and immersing himself in the then fashionable Italian musical style. In Rome he was taken up by some of the most influential people in the city who were also lavish patrons of the arts, the Cardinals Ottoboni, Pamphili and Colonna. Although Handel himself was Lutheran, he composed a number of sacred works for Catholic church services under the cardinals’ patronage and apart from one or two minor pieces all his church music in Latin including Dixit Dominus dates from the same year, 1707.

Although it is clear that Dixit Dominus was a commission, probably for the Colonna family, nothing is known about its first performance or indeed if it was ever performed during Handel’s lifetime. He composed it when he was only twenty-two, long before his more famous oratorios such as Messiah, yet in many respects it shows that his skills in writing large-scale works were already fully formed, even though the only compositions of any size he had written before this were two operas. The text is Psalm 110, the first psalm in the liturgy of Vespers, the evening service of the Catholic church, as it was given on Sundays and major feast days. ‘De torrente’ provides the only moment of reflection and lyricism in the work, the upper voices having the melody underpinned by an almost mystical chant.


From the time that Handel arrived in London from Germany in 1710 his reputation and income had been centred on the composition and production of Italian operas, and he had been phenomenally successful, with thirty-six operas staged between 1711 and 1737. At the start of the 1730s, however, he sustained heavy financial losses when audiences were lured away by a rival Italian opera company. Having only English singers at his disposal and sensing that the London public was beginning to lose its taste for Italian opera, Handel began to introduce oratorios in English into his subscription season of Italian opera. Such was their success that by 1739 his season contained only works in English and no operas at all.

Similar in structure to opera but with sacred subject matter, oratorios were cheap to mount because there was no staging and no sets or costumes. Opera goers were used to an evening’s entertainment at the theatre which lasted five hours, but to get around the fact that there was not as much music in oratorios as operas Handel composed instrumental works such as organ concerti to perform in the intervals to pad out the evening. This way, audiences would not go away feeling short-changed, and Handel could perform the solo organ part himself.

The Op. 4, No. 3 (HWV 291) organ concerto was one of two organ concertos that Handel first used in this way, during intervals of the oratorio Esther at Covent Garden in March 1735. His friend and supporter Mrs Pendarves wrote: “[Handel’s] playing on the organ in Esther, where he performs a part in two concertos … are the finest things I ever heard in my life.”

Scene Three — The ChapelProgram Notes


Scene Four — The FairgroundProgram Notes

NICOLA MATTEIS (fl. 1670, d. after 1713) was born in Naples and arrived in England as an unknown around 1670. He had apparently been living in obscurity in London for some time when the diarist John Evelyn heard him play in a private concert in 1674.

I heard that stupendious Violin Signor Nicholao (with other rare Musitians) whom certainly never mortal man Exceeded on that instrument: he had a stroak so sweete, & made it speake like the Voice of a man; & when he pleased, like a Consort of severall Instruments: he did wonders upon a Note: was an excellent composer also … nothing approch’d the Violin in Nicholas hand: he seem’d to be spirtato’d & plaied such ravishing things on a ground as astonish’d us all.”

Ground on the Scotch Humour is a set of virtuoso ‘divisions’ or ‘variations’ for the violin with lively, Scottish influenced rhythms.

Scarborough Fair is a traditional English ballad. Like most folk songs its origins are obscure and there are many different versions of both melody and lyrics. The impossible tasks to be performed by the lover (‘tell her to make me a cambric shirt without any seams or needlework’) are similar to ones mentioned in an obscure seventeenth-century Scottish ballad, The Elfin Knight, but references to a market (or fair) in the English seaside town of Scarborough only appeared in versions which date from the nineteenth-century. The version best known today is the arrangement recorded by American singers Simon & Garfunkel in 1965, which was featured in the movie The Graduate.

Wallom Green is an English country dance tune which is found in the 1686 edition of The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to Each Dance. The first edition was published in 1651 by John Playford, a prominent music publisher who was active in London in the second half of the 1600s. He was a friend of poets and musicians: Henry Purcell composed a ‘Pastoral Elegy’ on his death in 1687 and was one of the beneficiaries of his will.

The Dancing Master was a manual with dance instructions and music for a collection of English country dances. Each dance consisted of a series of figures designed to fit particular music, danced by a group of people in couples. So called country dances were popular as an entertainment from the seventeenth to the mid nineteenth-centuries. They often feature in novels by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and are still performed today. The Dancing Master was so popular that Playford (and his heirs) published several editions, adding new dances, and it forms an important record of English traditional music which may otherwise have been lost. The printed music consists of only the melodic line; it is up to the performers to decide how it should be played.

The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby is a traditional folk melody from County Donegal in Ireland, with words by the Irish poet Joseph Campbell added in 1904. The mother sings to her child, summoning up characters from Gaelic mythology such as Aoibheall, queen of the northern fairies, and The Green Man, harbinger of doom if he appears at night.

“


Scene Four — The FairgroundProgram Notes

Abdelazer was a bloodthirsty Restoration tragedy from 1695. Its author was Aphra Behn, whose plays were very successful on the London stage (Nell Gwynn, mistress of Charles II, played the lead in one of them). Behn was one of the first professional female writers in England but her work was lampooned because of the frequent use of sexual subjects. Purcell wrote one song and ten items of instrumental music for Abdelazer. The Hornpipe became a popular country dance tune known as Hole in the Wall.

Because country dances were part of an oral tradition, many of the tunes had more than one name. The Virgin Queen, probably a reference to Elizabeth I, was also known as Bobbing Joe. As Bobbing Joane it was used in several ballad operas in the early 1700s.

An Italian Rant appears in the 1657 edition of The Dancing Master, but the melody belongs to a popular Italian song from the sixteenth century when it was known as Il ballo di Mantova or La Mantovana, which translates as ‘A dance from Mantua’. The tune became popular throughout Europe in the seventeenth-century, and it may sound familiar: it is the main theme from The Moldau, by Smetana.

While the dances were for entertainment, some of them also recorded significant events in the community. Paul’s Steeple or St Paul’s Steeple may have come into existence as a ballad in 1561, when the steeple of Old St Paul’s church in London was struck by lightning and burnt down.

PROGRAM NOTES & TIMELINE © LYNNE MURRAY 2019

Facsimile of ‘The Virgin Queen’ from the fourteenth edition of Playford’s The Dancing Master

Performed in Scene Four – The Fairground


Behind the Scenes


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Libby McDonnell Costume Design Peter Rubie Lighting Design … · JOHN DOWLAND (1563-1626) is now...

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