On Valentines Eve B’rock explores the English baroque world of masques, and brings John Blow’s Venus and Adonis together with one of the most promising vocal ensembles of this times: ‘Stile Antico’.
The English theater music history evolved differently than on the mainland. While in Italy the opera arise as a full genre around 1600, it hardly arouse interest in England during the 17th century. There music and theater evolved into a semi-opera genre: a play with separate episodes or ‘masques’ in which singing and dancing combined with instrumental music and spectacular effects. Both john Blow as contemporary Matthew Locke wrote semi-opera’s.
‘Venus and Adonis’, with baseline ‘Masque for the Entertainment of the King’, is a milestone in the history of English opera. In the story contains several links to the political relationships between Charles II of England and his French counterpart Louis XIV.
Venus, godess of Beauty, is madly in love with the young en beautiful Adonis, who has a great passion for hunting. Out of love she lets him go, but in his hubris he gets killed by a boar. Venus is left behind and is inconsolable.
Matthew Locke based his ‘The tempest’ on the theater play of Shakespeare going by the same name. Later he rewrote some of the dance scenes into a suite.