JOHANN PEPUSCH: VENUS AND ADONIS

Libretto: Colley Cibber
Music: Johann Christoph Pepusch

In a new edition by Robert Rawson

Musical Director: Rudyard Cook
Producer: Michael Burden

New College Chapel
7 & 8 February 2025
8.30pm

Tickets available from Ticketsource 

Cast
Venus – Matilda Bates
Adonis – Sam Chichester-Clark
Mars – Rhys Williams

The Berlin-born Johann Christoph Pepusch spent much of his working life in in England arriving in 1704. He was an active musician, and is recorded as a violist, a theatre director, music theoretician, teacher, and organist. In 1726, he founded The Academy of Vocal Music with others; in around 1730–1, it was renamed The Academy of Ancient Music. He also founded the Madrigal Society, and in 1713 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music by the University of Oxford. He is best known today for his arrangement of the music for the 1728 Beggar’s Opera.

In his second decade in London, Pepusch wrote for Drury Lane a number of masques, small entertainments which included a setting of Barton Booth’s Death of Dido, staged by New Chamber in 2023. In 1715, he set Colley Cibber’s libretto Venus and Adonis, a take on the myth in which Venus, with whom Mars is already captivated, falls for Adonis (he is only interested in hunting). In a jealous rage, Mars arranges for Adonis’s death by boar during the hunt. In setting the text, Pepusch set the role of Adonis for his wife, Margarita de L’Epine en travesty.

Scenes from a Life
HENRY PURCELL

Conductor: Luke Mitchell
Director: Michael Burden

New College Ante-Chapel
28 & 29 February 2024
8.30pm

Tickets from: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on?q=New%20chamber%20opera

Matilda Bates (Saxon Sorceress)
Dara Collins (Saxon 2)
Jessie Edgar (Venus, Honour)
Alaw Grug Evans (Cupid, 2^nd Syren)
Sebastian Evans (Sylvan 1)
Austin Haynes (The Cold Genius)
Francesca German (Woden’s Hall Saxon, Nymph 3)
Ben Gilchrist (King Arthur, Ecole, Berger, Pan, Man 4)
Ischia Gooda (Philidel, Nereid, 1^st Syren)
Jemima Kinley (Nymph 1)
Raphaël Maurin (Saxon 1, Sylvan 3, Man 3)
Matt Pope (Saxon 3, Sylvan 2, Comus)
Jess Norton Raybould (Nymph 2, Man 2)

King Arthur is Henry Purcell’s most complicated ‘dramatick opera’ and contains some of his most recognisable music. The text is by John Dryden, and the plot is based on the battle between the Britons and the Saxons; characters include King Arthur, Merlin, Cupid, and Venus, with the action centering on the recovery by Arthur of his fiancé Princess Emmeline from the clutches of his enemy, the Saxon King Oswald. The show is what Judith Milhous calls a ‘multi-media spectacular.’ In our version, the concentration is on the musical interludes, and the score includes the best-known music: the ‘Frost Scene’ sung by the Cold Genius, the hymn ‘Fairest Isle’ performed by Venus, and ‘Harvest Home’, the rollicking drinking song sung by peasants.

The Draughtman’s Contract; Prospero’s Books 

Harpsichord Concerto BWV 1052

Conductor: Alessandro Mackinnon-Botti
Harpsichord: Luke Mitchell

New College Ante-Chapel
7 March 2024
8.30pm

To note: this concert has been incorrectly advertised in some places as taking place on 5 March 2024.

Tickets from: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on?q=New%20chamber%20opera

The composer Michael Nyman, whose music features in this concert, is a composer, librettist and musicologist, known for his collaborations with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway. Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract, released in 1982, is a murder mystery set in 1694 in a country house in Wiltshire (the house is the film is Groombridge Place). The draughtsman, who is murdered in the final scene, has been employed to draw a number of views of the estate, each one of which forms an episode of the story and of music, which borrows freely from the music of Henry Purcell. Prospero’s Books, a later Peter Greenaway film from 1991 British is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Sir John Gielgud plays Prospero. The conceit is that Prospero is Shakespeare, who in the film constructs the play inside his head, and at the end of the film sits down to write The Tempest.

Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto BWV 1052 in d minor was extent by 1734 in a version that originally consisted only of the orchestral parts; the solo part was added in later, and the whole copied by Bach himself in 1738 into the manuscript of all eight of his concertos, BWV 1052–1058. The work was written in stages, with all three movements being used as movements in cantatas.