Performances

This talk will explore the history of Twelfth Night and music, from the play’s first appearance, laden with songs, in the early seventeenth century, through to productions in the last twelve months at Regent’s Park, the Orange Tree and the RSC, all of which made newly-composed music a central focus.

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Dr Simon Smith's monongraph Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625 (CUP, 2017) won the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award and the University English Book Prize. As Early Modern Music Research Associate of Shakespeare’s Globe Smith provided historical music research for various productions including 'Original Practices' stagings of Richard III and Twelfth Night. ​  

The Wells Madrigal Singers – Amelia Monaghan and Naomi Mcloud-Jones (soprano), Andrew O’Sullivan (countertenor), Iain Mcloud-Jones (tenor) and Laurence Whitehead (bass) - delight in unaccompanied voice performances. With a common background in Cambridge and wider experience of other church music traditions, they present a choice programme of more than a dozen madrigals in Stratford’s historic Guild Chapel. 

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Introduced by Bruce O'Neil, Trustee of SIM. 

The Linarol Consort of Renaissance Viols - David Hatcher, Timothy Lin, Alison Kinder and Claire Horácek - is widely respected in Early and Baroque Music circles. Here they will be joined by Héloïse Bernard, the prize-winning young French-American soprano who has performed with them previously.  

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Introduced by Paul Higgins, Trustee of SIM. This concert is supported by Continuo Foundation  https://www.continuofoundation.co.uk/

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Few contemporary Elizabethan songwriters set Shakespeare’s sonnets to music. More recently, however, Ross Duffin, scholar and author of Shakespeare's Songbook, has matched some of the best-loved sonnets by Shakespeare to pre-existing tunes from the lute-song repertory. Our artists - Elizabeth Kenny (lute) and Mark Padmore (tenor) - will perform some of these sonnets for the very first time, alongside songs by John Danyel, Thomas Morley and John Dowland, in addition to twentieth-century composers, Benjamin Britten and Alex Roth. 

 

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