An Evening at the Theatre

Music for theatre and dance, London, 1680.

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"An Evening at the Theatre" recreates the musical part of a masque, as it might have been played in a London theatre around 1680.

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A courtly entertainment combining instrumental music, dance, acting, song, and pantomime, the masque flourished in England from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Complex polyphony, John Playford’s “country dance”, and Scottish folk music, while in principle separate, all coexisted in the sale musical moment.

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In the middle of the programme, we have chosen to emphasize the originality of the anti-masque, a real comic interlude within the masque. Its function was to mock and even to parody the king or some other person of high rank by scenic and instrumental oddities, before returning to a more courteous level, thus showing the submission of subjects to their sovereign.

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Works by Jacob Van Eyck, Nicolas Matteis, Matthew Locke, William Lawes, and Tobias Hume, are interpreted here, along with our own arrangements of dances by John Playford, the greatest publisher of the period.
 

Programme with 4 to 7 musicians

Marion Fermé: recorders

Sandrine Dupé: baroque violin

Isabelle Brouzes: viola da gamba

Victorien Disse: theorbo, baroque guitar

Yvan Garcia: virginal

Nadia Bendjaballah: percussion
Jeanne Zaepffel: soprano