Oxford early music day
Continuo Foundation & Oxford Festival of the Arts,
Linarol Consort of Viols, Bellot Ensemble, Sir Nicholas Kenyon
Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College. 12 July 2025

As part of the Oxford Festival of the Arts, the Continuo Foundation promoted an Early Music Day, or more accurately, an afternoon, in the nether regions of Magdalen College. The three events included two concerts, contrasting more established musicians with a recently formed group, both recipients of Continuo Foundation grants, and concluded with a talk by Sir Nicholas Kenyon exploring “A Century of Revolution in Musical Taste”.

The first concert was by three members of the Linarol Consort of Viols with countertenor William Purefoy. Their programme, Gibbons 400, celebrated the anniversary of the Oxford-born composer Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). The well-balanced programme contrasted Gibbons with other composers of the same era: William Byrd, Thomas Weelkes, Thomas Lupo, and John Bull, with a focus on the Fantasia, which Thomas Morley famously defined as “The most principal and chiefest kind of musicke which is made without a dittie is the fantasie, that is, when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and tumeth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit. In this may more art be showne than in any other musicke, because the composer is tied to nothing but that he may adde, diminish, and alter at his pleasure“.

The three viol players of the Linarol Consort wrestethed and tumethed their way through nine such Fantasias, all meeting Morley’s description of sequences of themes, each generally treated imitatively. An unusual one was the sonorous texture of Thomas Lupo’s Fantasia for three bass viols, which became increasingly busy before a grand conclusion. They also played the first four of Gibbons’ nine three-part fantasias, the third being of particular interest for its very long solo opening theme.

William Purefoy joined the viols for a contrasting sequence of sacred and secular vocal pieces and delighted in pointing out the well-known behavioural indelicacies of Weelkes and Bull. He did well when delving into the tricky lower register depths of his countertenor voice, albeit with a noticeable reduction in volume. My main quibble was his use of persistent and pronounced vibrato, in sharp contrast to the fine tuning and intonation of the three viol players. It turned cadences, which without the voice were a moment of quiet repose, into a rather unsettled conflict between the stable sound of the viols and the continuously pulsating voice.

They were followed by the Bellot Ensemble with their programme Cupid’s Ground Bass. They appeared under the banner of the Continuo Foundation’s “Emerging Artist Showcase” and will also be the next BBC Radio 3 New Generation Baroque Ensemble. My immediate reaction was the outstanding quality of their two singers, soprano Lucine Musaelian, who also played the viola da gamba, and tenor Kieran White, not least in the way that they controlled and used vibrato, quite correctly, in my view, as an ornament to be applied moderately and on specific and appropriate occasions. They were also commendably communicative with the audience, particularly Lucina Musaelian who generally sang sitting down while playing her gamba.

I liked the opening of their concert, with theorbo player Daniel Murphy playing Kapsberger’s extended Toccata prima from his Libro quarta d’intavolatura di chitarone. As well as providing an appropriate apéritif, it also reinforced the roots of the word Toccata, Italian for “to touch”, initially intended to improvise as an aid to tuning and pitch for other musicians. The genre was later extended to be a free-form display of a performer’s technical ability, something fulfilled on this occasion. After some rather effusive thanks from the group’s director to absolutely everybody (including his parents), there followed a sequence of vocal and instrumental pieces on the theme of love, by 17th-century Italian composers including Cavalli, Monteverdi, Strozzi, and Uccellini. Highlights included Lucine Musaelian’s singing of Barbara Strozzi’s Amor Dormiglione, a song intended to arouse a sleeping Cupid, helped by warnings of “Arrows, arrows, fire, arrows, arrows, get up, get up, fire, fire, get up, get up!“, and Strozzi’s Che si può fare. A video of the latter, performed by Lucine Musaelian and members of the Bellot Ensemble, can be viewed below.

The five other instrumentalists all made significant contributions, my only real quibble being the prominence, aurally and visually, of the first violinist, very obviously the ensemble’s director. The programme included several pieces where a pair of violins play interludes between vocal sections. I generally assume that these two violins should be evenly matched in style and volume, but this was rarely the case here. In moments when a solo violin performs alongside a singer, I suggest that the violin is usually considered a supporting instrument, responding to the singer, rather than being more prominent. That said, that is not the case in the video above, where the sound is better balanced between singer and violin than it was in this performance.

The afternoon concluding with a talk by Nicholas Kenyon with the title of The Pied Pipers of Early Music – A Century of Revolution in Musical Taste. Kenyon’s vast experience of the world or early music over many years and with many hats on gives him a unique overview of the various goings-on in the early music world since the early days of the revival. Formally the Controller of BBC Radio 3 and Director of the BBC Proms, Managing Director of the Barbican Centre, editor of the Early Music journal, and now an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and a Distinguished Affiliate Scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge, his academic credentials are impeccable.

I had hoped for some professional photos of the performance from the Oxford Festival of the Arts, but they haven’t arrived.

Information on early music events in the UK can be found on the Continuo Connect website.