ENGLAND'S HELICON
9th July 2006 3pm Great Elm Church Code: 0912 Author: Alan Burgess
The third Jackdaws concert in this year's Festival was based out of Frome. For many, visits to church are for family events such as christenings, weddings and funerals. Had you slipped into Great Elm Church on Sunday afternoon you would have been drawn into a series of perfect marriages in abundance.
Inside the tiny ancient church, set off the road, we were able to listen to Elizabethan music without twenty first century intrusions. Sitting in our exceedingly authentic wooden pews, with the door open, we found ourselves free of traffic noise and could hear only the wind blowing gently through the trees plus the occasional bark from Oscar the dog. It was an idyllic setting on a warm afternoon and we had music to match.
This was not just a concert, however. Dorothy Linell (lute and theorbo) and Gerald Place (voice, viol and recorders) talked us through seven miniature programmes of music performed in the time of Shakespeare. Each section was immaculately planned and ran almost seamlessly as a cameo of readings, songs and instrumental solos and duets. Gerald Place was particularly adept at shifting within seconds from singing to reading to playing on one of his recorders and back again.
The small church proved an intimate setting and the performers' manner of presenting the programme was so easy going that you felt you were in the company of friends at an informal gathering. Their short introductions to the music gave often humorous insights to the period, such as most barbershops having a lute so that customers could strum out the most recent popular song of the day as they waited their turn.
There was much to admire and the time flew by. There were some delightful juxtapositions such as Dowland's beautiful ‘Tarleton's resurrection' on lute followed immediately by the unaccompanied song ‘When that I was'. There was much finely judged singing, such as the gently sonorous ‘ding, dong bell' in ‘Full fathom five' and the doleful, plaintive falling phrases in ‘O death, rock me asleep'. ‘Heartsease' for lute and viol was most affecting and the ballad tunes before the interval were perfectly paced, allowing the music to breathe.
There were one or two historical liberties taken in the second half. We opened with a new work by Humphrey Clucas, a charming setting of a text by Sir Walter Raleigh, and stylistically very sympathetic to the Elizabethan idiom, while the reading ‘Joe and me at play' was a humorous view of Hamlet from 1890. Curiously and most appropriately, the reading from Philip Stubbs' ‘The Anatomy of Abuses' (1585) on the subject of football had an alarmingly present day feel: ‘Football encourages envy and hatred... sometimes fighting, murder and a great loss of blood.'
The afternoon drew to a much gentler close with some very lyrical songs by Pelham Humphrey and Henry Purcell's more familiar ‘If music be the food of love', on which note the audience adjourned for cream teas in the adjoining garden. Heaven on earth!
Alan Burgess
More Reviews
