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Theater season to end with a baroque concert
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SHAKESPEARE in Love,” a baroque concert to be staged at Shanghai Grand Theater next Thursday, will bring down the curtain on the current theater season, “Falling in Love with Shakespeare.”
The orchestra by English Concert will be conducted by Harry Bicket. It will perform arias and instrumental music from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen,” Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” and Matthew Locke’s version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Soprano Mary Bevan and counter-tenor Tim Mead are also lined up for the evening.
The concert is to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and of musicians who were inspired by him. “Nearly all the materials that were set to music by these composers deal with love, joy, sorrow and heartache; the title sums up these two themes,” says Bicket.
Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” was written to be interpolated into Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Locke’s music for “The Tempest” is one of the most original theatrical writing from a near contemporary of the Bard.
“Shakespeare in Love” interweaves dances for one of the great love stories told. Caesar and Cleopatra were set to music by the 18th-century British opera composer Handel.
“In England, there was no public opera. So what we have with Purcell is music written to be inserted into a spoken play. This was very common, and indeed many of the lute songs you hear would probably have been sung during performances of Shakespeare’s plays,” says Bicket.
As he sees it, English Baroque music is a mixture of styles from the continent of Europe. Many of the dances in Purcell and Locke are French in origin, but in Handel, audiences will also hear a strong Italian color since Italian opera was all the rage in London at the time. Purcell and Locke also look backward to an earlier era when harmony was more pungent and, to many ears, more “modern.”
As a chamber orchestra specializing in historically informed performance, the English Concert, which was established in 1973, is known for its skilled reinterpretation of the ancient pieces.
The orchestra plays on original instruments from the period the pieces were written. For the violins, the use of gut strings, short baroque bow, no chin rest and lower tension (hence a lower pitch also), not only changes the sound but also the articulation and phrasing of the music.
“I never feel this music is ‘old,’ it sounds very modern to me,” says Bicket. “And of course the subject matter of the songs and arias is timeless. We all fall in and out of love the same way nowadays as they did back in Purcell’s time.”
Bicket will play the harpsichord while conducting, which was very common until the 19th century when orchestras got too big and the music became too complex to be played without someone waving a baton.
“Like all great chamber orchestras, the English Concert doesn’t need a conductor to play well together. We all listen and watch each other and respond to both the players as well as singers. My role is to inspire and enable everyone to give their best, and I can do that by playing the harpsichord, as well as occasionally conducting from my seat,” says Bicket.
Bicket and his troupe were impressed by Chinese responses during their visit to Tianjin years ago.
“The audiences were very open and enthusiastic, even though I am sure that much of our music was completely new to them. They will find similarities in our music with theirs. It is always a privilege to be able to speak to people with whom we cannot necessarily communicate verbally but through the universal language of music,” says Bicket.
Date: December 15, 7:30pm
Venue: Shanghai Grant Theater, 300 People’s Ave
Tickets: 80-680 yuan
Tel: 6359-8032
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