Tag Archives: blow

Hail! Bright Cecilia

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Château de Versailles Spectacles have produced a really classy period instruments recording of Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia with a bonus of Blow’s Welcome Every Guest.  The band s La Poème Harmonique under the direction of their founder Vincent Dumestre.  It’s a very authentic period sound and the small chorus is precise and sings in excellent English.

The Blow piece is short but but interesting and it gets a sprightly and almost jazzy reading.  Both baritone Tomáš Král and teHugo Hymas are excellent and have perfect English,  “The sacred Nine” is particularly enjoyable.

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English baroque double bill

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Most opera lovers will be familiar with the Drottningholm Palace Theatre near Stockholm.  Less familiar is the Confidencen Theatre in the Ulriksdal Palace.  It’s a small theatre (200 seats?) built in the 1650s and restored in the early 21st century.  It now hosts concerts and operas and in August 2021 it played John Blow’s Venus and Adonis in a double bill with Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.  The operas were recorded and issued on Blu-ray and DVD.

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Venus and Adonis

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This year’s fall opera production from the Glenn Gould School is John Blow’s 1683(?) masque Venus and Adonis.  For those not familiar with the genre the masque was a court entertainment combining music, dance, poetry and drama.  Here the framing story is the brief love affair between Venus and handsome young Adonis who is unfortunately gored to death by a boar.  The main sub plot concerns Venus giving sage advice to Cupid and his band of little cupids.  In between there are hunting choruses, dance and extracts from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Venus & Adonis 2022 - Photo #1

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The Lessons of Love

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Last night Toronto Masque Theatre presented a double bill entitled The Lessons of Love.  First up was John Blow’s 1683 masque Venus and Adonis and it was followed by the premier of The Lesson of Da Ji; a fusion of Western and traditional Chinese elements by composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and librettist Marjorie Chan.

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