Barock+ | The Fairy-Queen

The Fairy-Queen

Rowan Pierce | soprano
Richard Egarr | conductor / harpsichord

Cipriani Potter | Symphony No. 1 in G minor
Georg Friedrich Handel | Concerto grosso in B-flat major op. 6 No. 7 HWV 325
Henry Purcell | Suite from "The Fairy-Queen"

Henry Purcell took the liberty of transforming Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" into a quicksilver semi-opera - with the emphasis firmly on "liberty", since the original classic doesn't exactly feature hymns to the Garden of Eden transplanted to China. Let no one claim the British had nothing to offer musically!

That was, after all, the oft-repeated charge: that England was a land without music. Purcell was admired as Orpheus britannicus, and works like his celebrated "Fairy-Queen" fairly crackle with invention and spirit. Yet it took others - Georg Friedrich Handel among them - to supply London with music of the highest order. Conductor and harpsichordist Richard Egarr sets out to show what lies beneath the radar of the European continent, including Cipriani Potter: a fully-fledged classical symphonist. Potter knew Beethoven and Rossini personally, wrote nine symphonies like the former, and brought to them the wit and melodic charm of the latter. He was nothing less than the first composer of real stature on British soil to take his bearings from Mozart's late dramatic works and Beethoven's symphonic landmarks, and to write symphonies that could stand alongside them.

Concert duration: approx. 100 minutes, including interval