Armonico Consort & Baroque Players: Purcell, The Fairy Queen

Saturday 6 July, 7.30pm

Armonico Consort at Thaxted Festival (wide shot)

Conductor: Christopher Monks, Artistic Director. Narrated by Oz Clarke OBE, The Fairy Queen is an opera combining elements of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a sequence of musical masques. The result is an enchanting fairy-tale fantasy.

Narrators: Oz Clarke & Laura Moretto
Sopranos: Eloise Irving, Hannah Fraser Mackenzie
Alto: William Towers
Tenor: Nathan Vale
Bass: Gareth John

Renowned for inspiring audiences with passionate, fresh and direct performances, Armonico Consort and Baroque Players make a welcome return to Thaxted Festival, led by Christopher Monks.

Narrated by Oz Clarke OBE and Laura Moretto, The Fairy Queen - like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream - combines earthy and familiar human emotions with the light-footed, other-worldly character of the fairy kingdom, taking us from bewitching beauty and pathos to rowdiest, raunchiest and broadest comedy. This semi-staged production will create for the first time a modern-day retelling, with a newly adapted text.

The score of The Fairy Queen was lost after Purcell’s death in 1695, but rediscovered in the late 19th century. Gustav Holst set his Morley College students the vast task of preparing the work for performance from some 1500 pages of the score. He conducted the full work in London in June 1911, introduced by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and so we owe its current existence to Holst.

‘Christopher Monks directs spirited performances with plenty of exuberant wit.’
David Vickers, Gramophone

Venue: Thaxted Parish Church
Tickets: £42*, £38, £32, £24, £16. Age 30 and under: £10
*Premium seating in centre front rows.

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