Mezzo Soprano Julian Perkins
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‘I Love and I Must’ Helen Charlston – Mezzo Soprano Julian Perkins – Harpsichord Jonathan Manson – Bass Viol William Carter – Theorbo Friday 21 May 2021, 7.30pm Live at St John’s Smith Square Livestreamed and available on demand for 30 days at www.sjss.org.uk London Festival of Baroque Music Friday 21 May 2021, 7.30pm Live at St John’s Smith Square Livestreamed and available on demand for 30 days at www.sjss.org.uk ‘I Love and I Must’ Helen Charlston – Mezzo Soprano Julian Perkins – Harpsichord Jonathan Manson – Bass Viol William Carter – Theorbo Purcell Music for a while Purcell Oh Lead me to some peaceful gloom Eccles Restless in thought Purcell I love and I must Corbetta Prelude – Canary – Chaconne Purcell The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation Purcell O Solitude Simpson Division in D major Purcell The cares of Lovers Purcell I attempt from Love’s Sickness Purcell What a sad fate is mine D Purcell Morpheus thou gentle god Blow Morlake Ground Purcell If music be the food of love Purcell Evening Hymn 2 A warm welcome to the 37th London Festival of Baroque Music, ‘Grounds for Optimism’, which brings together a combination of live concerts and online events over a long weekend as we emerge from lockdown. This year’s festival is split in to two parts. The first runs from 21st to 23rd May and this will be followed by a second part, from 18th to 20th September. Grounds for Optimism is the title of a short feature of five online concerts, given by harpsichordist Steven Devine which pairs ‘grounds’ by Henry Purcell with other intimate keyboard music from England in the late 17th century. Also featuring in the online series are the Rosary Sonatas of Biber, played by Bojan Čičić, and also with Steven Devine; three programmes of Bach given by Amici Voices directed by Helen Charlston; and five programmes devised and performed by Tabea Debus and friends. This first of the 3 live concerts sees Helen Charlston singing Purcell song, followed on Saturday 22 May with an intimate and improvisatory programme of 17th century music for viols and theorbo given by Newe Vialles and finally on Sunday 23 May, a programme of Purcell Verse Anthems from Tenebrae, directed by Nigel Short. Following the uncertainty and disappointment surrounding the cancellation of last year’s festival, along with so many other events and much of what we hold dear, it’s thrilling to be able to welcome audiences back to live music and to see the return of this much-loved festival. Operating at 15% of our usual capacity clearly presents enormous challenges. We therefore need your help to raise £10,000 to support this year’s festival. If you are in a position to help, please visit our Crowdfunder campaign here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/lfbm2021 Alternatively, to give by text message, text LFBM 10 to 70450 to donate £10. Texts cost £10 plus one standard rate message. We are immensely grateful to all of the festival’s Friends and supporters for enabling these events to take place and to all of you for joining us, whether in person or online. Thank you for your support. Richard Heason, Director of the London Festival of Baroque Music 3 Introduction from Helen Charlston I recently watched the new BBC adaptation of The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. The central characters, Fanny and Linda, are like chalk and cheese: Fanny spends her life seeking a safe and secure world, always finding the sensible path, led by reason. Linda is a slave to her heart, a romantic. She lives to find happiness, which she is convinced will come in the form of Love. Tonight’s programme is an exploration of all the Lindas of this world – how they steer themselves through life with love and pleasure as the only possible guiding light, and how those around them see (and judge) their numerous encounters with cupid. Henry Purcell (1659-1695) and his contemporaries may not have longed to tell the tales of the sensible head (a celebration of the Fannys of Restoration England will have to wait for another time), but the world of flight and fancy they have created will not disappoint. Join us as we fly in pursuit of love, through beguiling music, confusing pleasure, endless pain and aching beauty to celebrate every love story that has flourished or failed inconsolably. 4 Notes on the Music The Second of four movements of incidental music to Oedipus, Music for a While proclaims the healing power of music. Alecto, who torments the guilty with her hair of snakes and blood dripping from her eyes, cannot be stopped by any power other than music. It beguiles her, and calms her, releasing Oedipus from his servitude to guilt. Purcell’s adaptation of John Fletcher’s play Bonduca (which dates from October 1695, just a month before the composer’s death) deftly contrasts the pull of both glory and tragedy that epitomised Boudicca’s rule. Oh, Lead me to some peaceful gloom is her final utterance, and closes the whole work. Here Boudicca looks to love as an escape from her inevitable demise, a shelter from the trumpets and tumults of war and a place to ‘soothe her pleasing pain’. John Eccles (1668 – 1735) also spent a lot of time in the theatre writing incidental music for plays. Restless in Thought, disturb’d in mind was written to appear in She Ventures, She Wins, a comedy published by a Young Woman under the pseudonym of ‘Ariadne’ that tells the story of two young women who have had enough with the expected trials and tribulations of love. Intent on marrying someone who loves them for their minds not their money, they plot to test their suitors in a confusion of disguises and mistaken identities. The obsession of infatuation in I love and I must is characterised by a repeating idea first heard in the continuo and exactly repeated in the voice. Again and again, we hear this one bar motif as a fight plays out between the heart and the mind: “how should it be so easy to men, yet so hard to me”. This song appears in Purcell’s handwriting with a subtitle ‘Bell Barr’ which has yet to be fully explained. Some scholars suggest this title simply refers to this repeating musical idea, which has a chiming character to it, like a bell. In some recordings, performers have taken it upon themselves to show off this subtitle by adding a chime to Purcell’s score played by the singer. The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation sets words by Nahum Tate (the librettist of Dido and Aeneas) based story from Luke’s Gospel of a young Jesus disappearing for three days in Jerusalem from the perspective of an anxious Mary in her moment of realisation that she cannot find her young son. Tate’s words are extraordinary – Mary’s love for her son and fear of the situation sees her often abandon reason, as she hopes Jesus has found herself in the desert with tigers as these wild animals are mild than the tyrant Herod. Her struggle is one of heart and head, but also of faith and doubt as she tries whole heartedly to live out her trust in God despite the terror she feels. We move to the first ‘song upon a ground’ for the evening: O Solitude. The ground bass is a short, harmonically driven phrase which is here is repeated without any variation at all. The bass line remains a constant four bar phrase above which Purcell weaves an extraordinary vocal line, full of irregular phrase lengths, the first words sung by the voice suddenly appear halfway through the 3rd bar of the first ground. New ideas overlap with new entries of the bass so that listener and performer get lost within the structure and solitude’s hypnotic inevitability takes over. Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant’s poem La Solitude focuses on this transformative power of retreating from the noise of everyday life. Katharine Phillips chose, seemingly at random, three verses of this extended poem to translate which became the text for Purcell’s extraordinary song. The phrase ‘O solitude’ is repeated eight times as an interrupting refrain, always falling, and often at very chromatic intervals – falls of a seventh and a diminished fifth appear within the first eight bars alone. Purcell perfectly encapsulates the pull between the rewards and disappointments of this adored solitude: it is both pursued and hated. Purcell’s incidental music to Thomas Shadwell’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, appears in the form of a masque in which Cupid and Bacchus (the God of wine) argue over whether love or wine is more important. The cares of Lovers is Cupid’s contribution to the dispute. With their alarms, sighs, tears, charms, sweet torment and pleasing pain, surely love must win the day. 5 I attempt from Love’s Sickness to fly is, perhaps, one of Purcell’s most well-known songs both as part of The Indian Queen and as a solo song in its own right. Originally written for the 13 year old Laetitia Cross the aria is sung by Queen Zempoalla, as she finds herself stuck in the fever of love. Purcell’s opera remained uncompleted upon his death in 1695. His brother Daniel, from whom we hear more shortly, wrote a masque for act V to bring it to a close. Ruminating upon the consequence of that fevered love, we return to another song built on a ground, again characterised by musical simplicity and heightened poetic emotion.