0043 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 06-12-2010 09:43 Page 1 ohn low JVenus andB Adonis Theatre of the Ayre Elizabethdirected by Kenny 0043 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 06-12-2010 09:43 Page 2 Theatre of the Ayre Elizabeth Kenny JOHN BLOW 01 Cloe found Amintas lying (A Song for Three Voices) 06.20 02 Ground in G minor for violin and continuo 03.56 MICHEL LAMBERT 03 Vos mépris chaque jour me causent mille alarmes 03.41 ROBERT DE VISÉE 04 Chaconne 05.12 JOHN BLOW Venus anD ADonis 05 OVERTURE 03.37 PROLOGUE 06 Cupid ‘Behold my arrows and my bow’ 07.00 07 Cupid’s Entry 01.14 08 Tune for Flutes 02.33 ACT 1 09 Adonis ‘Venus!’ 02.27 10 Hunters’ Music 03.51 11 Chorus ‘Come follow, follow to the noblest game’ 02.32 12 A Dance by a Huntsman 01.19 13 Act Tune 01.54 ACT 2 14 Cupid ‘You place with such delightful care’ 01.56 15 The Cupids’ Lesson 03.03 2 0043 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 06-12-2010 09:43 Page 3 Cupid and the little Cupids ‘The insolent, the arrogant’ 16 A Dance of the Cupids 01.28 17 Venus ‘Call the Graces’ 01.08 18 Chorus of the Graces ‘Mortals below, Cupids above’ 01.22 19 The Graces’ Dance 01.26 20 Gavatt 00.46 21 Saraband for the Graces 01.22 22 A Ground 01.52 23 Act Tune 02.39 ACT 3 24 Venus ‘Adonis!’ 05.03 25 Venus ‘With solemn pomp let mourning Cupids bear’ 07.05 Theatre of the Ayre Elizabeth Kenny director/theorbo/guitar Venus Sophie Daneman Adonis Roderick Williams Cupid Elin Manahan Thomas Soprano and shepherdess Helen Neeves Alto and shepherd Caroline Sartin Tenor and huntsman Jason Darnell Bass and shepherd Frederick Long Cupids from Salisbury Cathedral Girls’ Choir, coached by Director of Music David Halls, with kind permission of the Dean and Chapter Grace Beverley, Flora Davies, Kelly Frost, Hermione Leitch, Rebecca Lyles, Helena Mackie, Georgiana RoXburgh, Rosanna Wicks violins Rachel Podger, Clare Salaman viola Galina Zinchenko bass violin and viol Alison McGillivray recorders Pamela Thorby, Kate Latham, Merlin Harrison theorboes/guitars Elizabeth Kenny, David Miller harpsichord James Johnstone 3 0043 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 06-12-2010 09:43 Page 4 BLOW: VENUS AND ADONIS Venus and Adonis, Blow’s masterpiece, is the last lyrical music plus a couple of contrasting dances masque ever composed for the Stuart court (essential masque ingredients). The scene is set and, though in effect a miniature all-sung opera, for Act I with a sensuously writhing tune scored retained some traces of earlier masquing con- for recorders, instruments specifically associated ventions, one of which was the participation of with love and seX. The embraces of Venus and royalty. It therefore stands at the cross-roads of Adonis, vividly depicted in their music, are masque and opera, and is yet more important for interrupted by the sounds of huntsmen’s horns, having subsequently served Purcell as the model but – in a reversal of the myth – Adonis, urged by for Dido and Aeneas. Its date is uncertain, but Dr Venus to join the hunt, is reluctant to do so, and Sandra Tuppen of the British Library has recently agrees only when the huntsmen arrive on stage found evidence pointing to Shrovetide 1683, and ask him to lead them against a mighty boar. which fits with the style of the music and the age In Act II, the boudoir interlude, Venus coaches of the youngest member of the cast – its only royal Cupid and the Little Cupids in the cunning arts of member, if a slightly down-at-heel one. Lady Mary making perverse love-matches, and the Graces Tudor, who played Cupid, was the illegitimate literally dance attendance upon Venus. The act daughter of Charles II and a retired actress named concludes with a string of courtly dances which Moll Davies, who played Venus. The librettist, may be a vestige of the revels, the social dances long and frustratingly elusive, was identified only which concluded the Jacobean and Caroline two years ago by Professor James Winn of Boston masque; the last of them is a particularly University as Anne Kingsmill (subsequently imposing ground-bass number – a fine example married as Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea), of the Grand Dance which ends many of Lully’s who was a Maid of Honour to Maria Beatrice of contemporaneous entertainments for Louis XIV. Modena, the wife of Charles II’s brother James Then the mood suddenly darkens from comedy and a keen enthusiast for opera. Much of the and grace into tragedy. For Venus’s heartbroken second act of the masque, which is unconnected farewell to Adonis, mortally wounded by the boar, with the plot, deals instead with the duties of the Blow created some of the most gloriously Maids of Honour, represented on stage by the eloquent declamatory music ever composed in Graces. England, and a mourning chorus of cupids whose The conventional Prologue, too, is unconnec- expressive power wasunprecedented in English ted with the myth, presenting a conversation – dramatic music. about the vicissitudes of love, naturally – between Cupid and a group of shepherds and *** shepherdesses, and including some ravishing 4 0043 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 06-12-2010 09:43 Page 5 The discovery that Venus and Adonis had a movingly declares despite the artifices to which female librettist starts a train of thinking such an environment leads, she gives him ‘freely about the female voice in what is at first glance all delights / With pleasant days and easy nights’. averymale dominated – notto saystereo- In Act II Venus rehearses Cupid’s lessons and, typically chauvinist – corner of English music, the in a parody of the teaching which was John Blow’s Restoration. Add in the powerful image of Venus day job with the Children of the Chapel Royal, they and Cupid being sung not by a female and a are dutifully passed on to Little Cupids. But a cheeky young boy, but by a retired actor-singer- stunning reversal comes when it is Venus who royal mistress and her daughter glowing on the asks Cupid how to keep hold of Adonis, and the cusp of adolescence and you have a telling insight girl replies ‘use him very ill’. This is a stock treat- into the nature of female power structures which ment but, significantly an abandonment of Venus’ give this masque-opera an entirely different feel own ‘free’ philosophy. Blow used almostthe to its cousin, Dido and Aeneas. Both Dido same notes for her manic laughter – albeit a lot and Venus are the authors of their own fates, faster – as will reappear as her unhinged howl at but Nahum Tate’s Dido follows the – traditional the end of the story. With this eXchange Venus has male? – view of an out-of-control heroine, where- ceded authority to Cupid, a culture has embraced as in Kingsmill’s reworking of the classical story it cynicism rather than the opposite, and nothing is Venus’ realism and clear-eyed wish to preserve will be the same again. The young can be as cal- a no-longer-youthful passion which sends them lous as they like, because they have the magazine both to ruin. She send Adonis off to hunt and of beauty without even trying. Usually male lovers to his doom because she needs to stay and like the ‘decoying’ shepherds in Dryden/Purcell’s attend to her ‘magazine of beauty’, and does not King Arthur are in the driving seat, but in this wish her middle-aged lover to tire, a piece of libretto it is the female desire that comes first: ‘To satire against Adonis (for which contemporary warm desires the women nature moves, / And audiences would have read Charles) which every youthful swain by nature loves.’ In the real perhaps only a female writer could get away with world this power doesn’t get them very far. (and which was tactfully re-written for the The first half of this recording is a brief taste sensibilities of Josias Priest’s girls school, where of the sound world of Restoration chamber Venus, like Dido, was later performed). The performance, whose resourcesBlow used to full libretto treads an uneasy line between worldly effect in Venus. We open with the teasingly cynicism and a rejection of the same: Cupid theatrical Cloe found Amintas lying. Blow had rolls out the courtiers-are-faithless line at the written this for countertenors, but included it in audience’s expense in the Prologue, but Venus Amphion Anglicus – his retrospective collection of 5 0043 CD Booklet RPM.qxd 06-12-2010 09:43 Page 6 vocal music published in 1700 – in a version for headily sensous song set over a ground bass.) sopranos, catering to a demand for songs for Lambert played the theorbo and sometimes sang female voices. As was customary, the parts were his own songs but he also performed alongside simply printed an octave higher, producing a Hiliare Dupuy, his sister-in-law and the soprano tessitura more comfortable for bats (though in star of Louis XIII’s court. Like Blow, Lambert used this performance it is transposed downward for the symphony song form – songs interspersed the comfort of performersand listenersalike!). with instrumental ritornelli – in his 1689 collec- The cunningly wrought cyclic scheme of Dryden's tion, Ayres a une, ii, ii et iv voix avec la basse poem, whose subtitle is ‘A Roundelay’, allows continue. Theorbo, lute and guitar player Robert Blow full scope for reiterating the sensuous de Visée worked both in this sort of eXclusive passage that depicts a kiss.