REVIEW: Shakespeare in Music Festival, Various venues, 20-23 April<\/p>\n
By Peter Buckroyd<\/p>\n
The Shakespeare in Music Festival has quickly established itself as Stratford\u2019s musical event of the year. It consisted of seven daytime concerts, (one of which was cancelled because of illness), four other daytime events and four evening events held in Holy Trinity Church.<\/p>\n
I attended six of the daytime concerts, five of them in the United Reformed Church and the other in the Guild Chapel.<\/p>\n I was reminded that when you went to the theatre in Shakespeare\u2019s day you didn\u2019t say that you had seen a play as we do now, but that you had heard a play. You didn\u2019t go to find about the story but in the vast majority of cases you were familiar with the plot but went to hear what this particular writer had done with it. This festival offered the possibility of doing a similar thing with music because we heard several different performances of the same thing, interpreted by different artists. For example, I heard four performances of Thomas Morley\u2019s \u2018O Mistress Mine\u2019. Countertenor Benjamin Irvine-Capel gave a splendid straightforward rendering of the song, beautifully phrased and with a lovely pure sound. Oxford\u2019s Arcadian Singers opened their concert with a choral a capella version. The Bloomsbury Baroque Ensemble treated us to a delightful version for bass viol, renaissance violin, renaissance flute, harpsichord and soprano. The Painted Fall gave us an instrumental version from 1599 for harp and viola. Same tune. Very different versions.<\/p>\n Each of the groups also had their own specific focus. Benjamin Irvine-Capel\u2019s Songs for Countertenor (the star of the festival for me) was a recital entirely of period songs most of them to words by Shakespeare ably accompanied by Kristiina Watt on the lute. He has a lovely pure sound and beautifully phrased performances. I was particularly struck by the gentle pace, splendid variations of tempo and gradual rallentando contributing to a surprising range of emotion in Robert Johnson\u2019s \u2018Full Fathom Five\u2019. It was interesting to hear that Johnson was the only composer known to have composed for Shakespeare\u2019s company, The King\u2019s Men. Irvine-Chapel transported us to the Elizabethan court where clearly the quiet, calm and reflective nature of the music must have been a remarkable contrast with and respite from the often tempestuous turmoil of its political manoeuvrings.<\/p>\n The delivery of Dowland Factory\u2019s programme could hardly have been more different. In their Facets of Time programme. Daniel Thomson sang quietly but painted every word and phrase. In his performance of Dowland\u2019s \u2018Clear or Cloudy\u2019, for example, he placed great emphasis on the syncopations, creating a series of surges. It was unfortunate that his and Sami Brown\u2019s performances of the five sonnets and the extract from Macbeth were so quiet that they were unfathomable. It was a lovely idea, however, to have the lute playing gently as the audience arrived.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Bloomsbury Baroque Ensemble\u2019s programme Shakespearean Music for \u2018Broken Consort\u2019 was a delight from beginning to end. Philippa Hyde\u2019s crystal-clear soprano worked perfectly with William Summers\u2019s renaissance flute, Ibrahim Aziz\u2019s bass viol, Diane Moore\u2019s renaissance violin and Yeo Yat-Soon\u2019s harpsichord. Yat-Soon\u2019s introductions to the pieces were informative and unusually audible. This perfectly balanced group of musicians was able, in \u2018O Mistress Mine\u2019, for example, to create a quintet rather than a voice with accompaniment. It was also a delight to hear how several of the songs featured a duet for voice and flute, each perfectly poised. There was a huge range of musical effects in this programme, none more striking than the splendid staccato vocal opening of Robert Johnson\u2019s \u2018Hark, hark the lark\u2019 with the harpsichord. Voice and instruments in perfect harmony.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t feel quite the same about The Painted Fall\u2019s programme. I found it hard to become acclimatised to the for me unfamiliar combination of harp, viola and two voices. Their programme, Shakespeare Songs, Ancient and Modern, was interesting and imaginatively compiled and it introduced me to twentieth century composer Madeleine Dring whose work I had not come across before. Her \u2018Come Away Death\u2019 was written in 1949 for elegiac voice and harp and \u2018Take O Take Those Lips Away\u2019 had a similarly plaintive mood, both elegiac and lyrical. The two voices singing in harmony were particularly effective in Taylor Swift\u2019s \u2018Love Story\u2019. It was thought provoking to have the programme end with two versions of Sonnet 29 written a hundred and fifty years apart, one by Hubert Parry and the other by Rufus Wainwright.<\/p>\n The most exciting sound of the festival came in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Madrigals from Oxford\u2019s a capella Arcadian Singers, ably conducted by Gerard Lim. It took a while for the ear to become attuned to the number of parts in each song, because these varied. This thirteen voice choir produced an accomplished sound and considerable variety of pace, intonation and shaping. It soon became clear that they were listening attentively to each other, both between and within parts. I loved the variation of volume in Thomas Morley\u2019s \u2018Sing We and Chant It\u2019, the depth of sound created by the basses in Gastoldi\u2019s \u2018L\u2019innamorato\u2019, the sustained lines, placed and poised discords and beautiful pianissimo singing in Lindberg\u2019s \u2018Shall I Compare Thee\u2019, the perfect rhythm and movement from flirtatiousness to deeper passion in \u2018Come Again\u2019 and the elegant way in which the religious\/sexual metaphor and ambiguity in Campion\u2019s \u2018Never Weather-beaten Sail was shown.\u2019 The ensemble was complemented by two splendid soloists \u2013 a tenor and a soprano.<\/p>\n The last of the concerts which particularly interested me was All Fancy Sick I Am From Love, a second recital from the Bloomsbury Baroque Ensemble, showing what happened a century after the Elizabethan and Jacobean compositions. It was fascinating to listen to what happened to rhymical variation, tonalities, interplay between voice and instruments, repetitions, decorations, harmonies and occasional dissonances from the previous age. I particularly enjoyed the extracts from The Fairies by John Christopher Smith, the music copyist, we were told, for Handel when he went blind and those from Pyramus and Thisbe, a mock opera by John Frederick Lampe. I didn\u2019t know about Thomas Chilcot based in Bath in the mid eighteenth century. His \u2018Orpheus with his lute\u2019 featured William Summers\u2019s flute with pizzicato strings and Philippa Hyde\u2019s soprano as her melodies were echoed by the flute. Uniquely in this concert there was no harpsichord, perhaps pointing forward to the next age when the harpsichord was used less and less.<\/p>\n All in all this was a series of wonderful events. An hour was the perfect duration for this kind of recital. Audience members were provided with invaluable free programmes and the idea of having the performers introduce their numbers was excellent. The United Reformed Church and Guild Chapel are great venues for music of this kind, but their rather cavernous acoustics are very unkind to the spoken voice. Perhaps in future years there will be some amplification for speech.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.stratford-herald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" REVIEW: Shakespeare in Music Festival, Various venues, 20-23 April By Peter Buckroyd The Shakespeare in Music Festival has quickly established itself as Stratford\u2019s musical event of the year. It consisted of seven daytime concerts, (one of which was cancelled because of illness), four other daytime events and four evening events held in Holy Trinity Church. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2398317,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[21792,21800,468169],"class_list":["post-2398316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-music","tag-whats-on-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/REVIEW-Shakespeare-in-Music-Festival-in-Stratford-upon-Avon.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2398318,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398316\/revisions\/2398318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2398317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Benjamin](\"https:\/\/www.stratford-herald.com\/_media\/img\/QJF5DIXLKPSGKUVH581L.jpg\")