An exploration of early music, looking at early developments in musical performance and composition in Britain and abroad. UK only: please note that not all episodes are podcast.
In this week raising awareness of mental health, Hannah French considers Music for Melancholy. From Dowland’s Flow, My Tears, to David’s Harp, she’s off in search of music with the power to balance the humours and transform the spirit. CPE Bach offers a contest between Sanguinius and Melancholicus and Michel Richard Delalande emerges as a figure who turned to music when faced with mental trials both great and small.
Lucie Skeaping explores the many Baroque operatic settings inspired by Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso, including music by Francesca Caccini, Vivaldi, Handel, Steffani, Hasse, Lully and Haydn.
As he celebrates his 70th birthday, conductor Jeffrey Skidmore talks to Hannah French about his career in music and his life on tour and in the studio with the ensemble Ex Cathedra.
Hannah French looks into the music behind Johann Sebastian Bach's Easter Oratorio, which was composed in Leipzig and first performed on Easter Sunday in 1725.
Hannah French explores the colourful lives and little-known music of two 18th-century German princess-composers, both related to Frederick the Great... and both called Anna Amalia!
Bach’s Germany was an agrarian society. Just beyond Leipzig’s city walls, farmers worked the land to grow crops that sustained its citizens. Some of Bach’s music explicitly engages with farming. Its rustic oomph and repetitive motifs call to mind the manual toil of digging. John Eliot Gardiner even described the texture of one Bach cantata as “warm topsoil, fertile and well irrigated”. Yet devotional writings of Bach’s time make it clear that farming was something not just done out on the fields...
Lucie Skeaping explores the life and works of one of colonial Latin America's greatest composers - Juan Gutierrez de Padilla. Musician, priest and purveyor of fine musical instruments, Padilla was born in 1590 in Malaga, Spain. He took a big step in his church career by emigrating to Mexico in his 30s, and by the mid-1600s, he was Musical Director of Puebla de Los Angeles' magnificent cathedral and composer of a substantial collection of glorious works for double choir - firmly establishing the ...
Orlando Lassus wrote a staggering number of pieces about wine, covering all genres from sacred to secular and everything in between. They tell us much about life, trade, and feasting in Munich in the second half of the 16th century, but also show that Lassus was quite the wine connoisseur: not only in drinking the best wines across Europe, but even his knowledge of wine production. For this second of two programmes, Hannah French is joined down the line from New York by wine historian and musico...
Orlando Lassus wrote a staggering number of pieces about wine, covering all genres from sacred to secular and everything in between. They tell us much about life, trade, and feasting in Munich in the second half of the 16th century, but also show that Lassus was quite the wine connoisseur: not only in drinking the best wines across Europe, but even his knowledge of wine production. For this first of two programmes, Hannah French is joined down the line from New York by wine historian Ron Merlino...
As part of Radio 3’s Light in the Darkness season, illuminating winter, Lucie Skeaping explores depictions of chiaroscuro - a technique used in visual art that produces striking musical contrasts too. With music by Gesualdo, Dowland, de Rore, Handel, Graupner and Haydn.
Hannah French and Zak Ozmo explore the life and work of the extraordinary 16th-century Italian lutenist, music theorist and composer Vincenzo Galilei, who was born around 500 years ago. Galilei was a hugely important figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance - a polymath, who studied the science of music as well as performing it, and was clearly an enormous inspiration for his son - the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei. Some scholars credit him with directing the activity of his...
The 18th-century singer Caffarelli expressed a wish to be castrated when he was just ten years old - already wanting a career in music. He flourished into one of Europe's finest singers, and enjoyed great fame - and notoriety - for almost forty years, amassing a great fortune along the way. Many composers of the day created roles for him in their productions, including Handel, Porpora, Hasse, Pergolesi and Gluck. Lucie Skeaping explores Caffarelli's extraordinary life and career with music from ...
For just under a year, from 1705, Telemann was employed by Count Erdmann II of Promnitz in northern Poland. His tenure was cut dramatically short by developments in the Great Northern War, but during his time in Zary and Silesia, the composer came into contact with Polish folk music, which influenced him for the rest of his career. When travelling through Poland with his employer, Telemann would often stop at taverns for refreshment or accommodation, and there he heard Polish gypsies improvising...
Hannah French begins a series of four programmes associated with the ancient Greek concept of the four elements - symbolic forces that inspired Renaissance and Baroque composers with the essences of creation out of chaos: air, water, fire, and today earth. Today's programme focuses on all things earthly, with music by Rebel, Purcell, Handel, Almeida, Monteverdi, Ramsay, Brumel, Delalande, Morley and Byrd.
Hannah French profiles the life and music of John Dunstaple - a musical innovator, influencer and leading composer of his generation, during the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI.
A selection of recordings from previous prize-winners at the biennial York Early Music International Young Artists Competition stretching back to 1985. Performers include oboist Paul Goodwin, harpsichordist Nicholas Parle, soprano Mhairi Lawson and ensembles Stile Antico, Ensemble Amarillis, Consone and Sollazzo. Presented by Lucie Skeaping
A further selection of recordings from previous prizewinners at the biennial York Early Music International Young Artists Competition stretching back to 1985. Performers include The Locke Consort, I Fagiolini, Savadi, Le Jardin Secret, Profeti della Quinta, BarrocoTout and last year's winners L'Apotheose. Presented by Lucie Skeaping.
The ancient Greek tale, Hercules at the Crossroads, sees the man of the moment offered a choice between Vice and Virtue. Personifications of each visit him to offer the option of a pleasant and easy life, or a hard but glorious one. It was all the rage in the Renaissance, inspiring writers and artists and remained so to the time of Bach and Handel. Two pillars of the Baroque, each knowing something of pleasure and toil, and each setting this Herculean conundrum in his own style. Which will you c...
At the turn of the 18th century, a contest was announced in an attempt was made to kick-start the operatic scene in London. The brief was to set an all-sung English opera based on William Congreve's short libretto: The Judgement of Paris. An alluring 100 guineas was promised to the winner, and four contestants entered the competition: John Weldon, John Eccles, Daniel Purcell and Gottfried Finger. Each entry was given an individual premiere before all four were staged on one night - a grand final...
Celebrating the early cultural contribution of black people in the arts in the 17th and 18th centuries, including music by the first black man to vote in a British general election, Ignatius Sancho. There's also the musketeer Le Chevalier Meude-Monpas, 'the Black Mozart' Joseph Boulogne Chevalier de Saint-George, Brazilian composer Jose Nunes Garcia, and the real dedicatee of Beethoven's 'Kreutzer' Sonata. Lucie Skeaping presents.
Hannah French joins trumpeter Simon Desbruslais at the Bate Collection in Oxford to explore some of the museum's examples of Renaissance and Baroque trumpets. Featuring music by Albinoni, Cacciamani, Bach, Telemann, Homilius, Kauffman and Hummel.
Hannah French talks to father and son team Masaaki and Masato Suzuki about period performance ensemble Bach Collegium Japan, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. With music by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.
Hannah French is joined by members of vocal ensemble Stile Antico to explore choral music written for the festive season.
Hannah French and violinist Adrian Chandler chat about 25 years of his ensemble La Serenissima, including recordings of music by Vivaldi, Tartini, Pisendel and Fasch.
Lucie Skeaping explores early music that evokes stormy weather and extreme climates, from tempests to heatwaves. Featuring works by Marin Marais, Matthew Locke, Jean Fery-Rebel and Christopher Tye.
Lucie Skeaping takes a look at the life and works of the remarkable early 16th-Century French composer Jean Mouton, compared only to the great master of the Renaissance polyphony, Josquin des Prez. Mouton excelled in writing especially elegant and deep religious motets, as well as other religious pieces for the French court, where he spent most of his career. He was also a teacher and had among his pupils no other than Adrian Willaert, who went on to create the Venetian school in Italy. So great...
AL-ANDALUS! THE TREASURES OF MOORISH SPAIN & PORTUGAL. A day of programme exploring the music and culture of Al-Andalus - the 800 year period of Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal which ended in 1492. Al-Andalus was both a beacon of learning and knowledge in the Middle Ages and a place of subordination for Christians and Jews. The music and culture which emerged from the three faiths left a unique legacy. Hannah French is joined in the studio by guests including musicologist Jonathan Shannon,...
Choreographer and dance historian Darren Royston joins Lucie Skeaping to explore the 16th-century dancing manual, "Orchesographie", published in 1589 in Langres by a French cleric who went under the pseudonym of Thoinot Arbeau. The manual is in the form of a dialogue between Arbeau himself and a fictional pupil by the name of Capriol, and the dances and music therein became familiar all across Europe.
Recorded at the Palace of St James's in London. Lucie Skeaping examines music written for the Chapel Royal with its director Joseph McHardy, with the backdrop of more than 300 years of turbulent history of Britain from the 15th to the 17th centuries, the different monarchs that were in power at the time and the composers who served them. Familiar names like Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and Henry Purcell feature, but also those of lesser-known composers like John Pyamour, Robert Faryfax, Thomas To...
The life and sacred works of 16th-century composer Claude Le Jeune, active during ferocious religious wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants in France. Lucie Skeaping talks to Edward Wickham, Music Director at St Catharine's College Choir, Cambridge, and historian Tom Hamilton to unravel the composer's age and how it affected his music and that of his fellow Huguenot contemporaries.
