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| Solomon’s Knot at Kirby Corridor in 2023 |
George Jeffreys & the Delivery of the English Baroque; Solomon’s Knot, James Garnon, Helen Schlesinger, author & director: Federay Holmes; Wigmore Corridor
Reviewed 24 February 2025
A dramatised presentation that delivered to life the just about forgotten English composer George Jeffreys and his turbulent instances, illuminating his impassioned, Italianate music
George Jeffreys, crucial English Baroque composer between Byrd and Purcell, nonetheless stays a reputation that many haven’t heard of. However fortunately, he appears to be having one thing of a second. In 2024, Solomon’s Knot launched an album of Jeffreys’s music on Prospero Classical [see my review] and I chatted to organist William Whitehead about his enthusiasm for Jeffreys’s music [see my interview].
Now Solomon’s Knot has developed a reside programme based mostly on Jeffreys’s music, collaborating with director and author Federay Holmes (an affiliate artist of Shakespeare’s Globe) and actors James Garnon and Helen Schlesinger. George Jeffreys & the Delivery of the English Baroque was carried out at Wigmore Corridor on 24 February 2026. The night wove collectively works Jeffreys’ and different composeers with a dramatic presentation of Jeffreys’s life with Garnon because the composer and Schlesinger enjoying his spouse and Girl Hatton, the spouse of his patron. The singers had been Zoe Brookshaw, Clare Lloyd-Griffiths, Kate Symonds-Pleasure, James Robinson, David de Winter and Jonathan Sells. James Robinson was changing tenor Thomas Herford who was unwell, although a few of Herford’s solos had been sung by David de Winter.
In her programme notice, Federay Holmes factors out that if Jeffreys’s scores and half books had been misplaced or destroyed then we’d have identified him solely because the unremarkable Steward of the Hatton household working away at Kirby Corridor. Jeffreys’s surviving letters to Lord Hatton, Girl Hatton and their son cowl the 1630s to the 1680s, but none mentions music. We all know lots about Jeffreys, regarding his work as steward, and we all know the music he was writing and copying. However we have now no texts to hyperlink the 2.
To resolve this, and supply context for the viewers, Holmes created her dramatic presentation which was anchored by James Garnon’s terrific efficiency as Jeffreys, rightly dominating the stage whether or not speaking or listening to music. There’s a sense of impassioned spiritual devotion to Jeffreys’s music allied to his drawing inspiration from the Italian masters whose work his patrons had collected. Holmes’s drama offered a convincing context for this. It’s value making an allowance for that for all the ability of Jeffreys’s music, we have now no actual thought why he wrote it or for whom, however we have now to imagine that the family at Kirby Corridor included appropriate singers for his items. These are not any Jacobean consort songs within the English method however draw real inspiration from the Italian composers in a approach that was outstanding.
The drama took us from Jeffreys’s early years in Oxford main into the interval when King Charles took the Courtroom there, then the King’s execution and Jeffreys’s appointment as Steward at Kirby. This led to disquisitions on Parliament and Puritanism, the monetary issues when the Hattons estates had been sequestered, and the later interval when King Charles II was restored however Lord Hatton remained out of favour and Jeffreys by no means acquired a spot at Courtroom.
Typically Holmes’s creativeness appeared to incorporate wilder flights of fancy – did we actually want Girl Hatton fantasising about what the spirits of King Charles I and his brother Prince Henry would say to one another within the afterlife? However anchoring all of it was a robust and extremely plausible portrait of Jeffreys himself as incarnated by Garnon, ably supported by Schlesinger in numerous roles.
Musically we started with Byrd, and an English contrafactum of Civitas sancti which helped set the musical world that Jeffreys arose from. The penultimate piece in the entire programme was Purcell’s Sonata in Three Components No. 1 in G minor, one of many set that Purcell had printed and which had been amongst the ultimate issues that Jeffreys copied.
In between was an entire vary of his work. Threading their approach via the programme had been his settings of English poetical spiritual texts (primarily nameless) – How wretched is the state; A Music Unusual (Pentecost); Whisper it simply (Passiontide); The Lord in Adversity; Search for, all eyes (Ascension). Intimate works for 4 or 5 singers and continuo, while they may appear to slot in the custom of the English consort music there was little of that right here. As a substitute, Jeffreys’s Italian influences had been to the fore and these evoked very a lot the Italian madrigal. But what was additionally fascinating was the way in which that, irrespective of how intense the primary physique of the work, Jeffreys may discover a component of radiance or passionate depth within the closing pages. In a world the place public music was largely forbidden and personal music extremely managed, there will need to have been one thing great about sitting within the Nice Corridor at Kirby and listening to a extremely private efficiency of those items.
Jeffreys’s Italianate roots had been additionally obvious within the cantata Felice pastorella (Blissful the shepherdess) with its Italian textual content and writing for 3 soloists – tenor David de Winter, bass Jonathan Sells and soprano Clare Lloyd-Griffiths. David de Winter, standing in for Thomas Herford and utilizing music, did a superb job and all three soloists had been partaking on this piece which gave the impression to be Jeffreys emulating the Italian masters whose music was within the Kirby library. The opposite non-English language piece was the Latin texted O quam jucundum for 4 voices and continuo. Regardless of the liturgical Latin textual content, the piece sounded way more like a madrigal and obtained a vibrant efficiency. I famous that the singers had been utilizing non-standard, presumably interval pronunciation for the Latin.
Total, I believed maybe that the steadiness may have been tipped in favour of the music extra with barely much less spoken passages. Additionally, I felt that some particulars in Holmes’s drama had been difficult to apprehend and it gave the impression to be assumed that you just had learn and digested her complete programme notice first.
However this was an interesting and fascinating experiment that succeeded in bringing a comparatively forgotten English composer to life. I do hope that Solomon’s Knot’s espousal of Jeffreys’s music will result in all method of additional performances.
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Elsewhere on this weblog
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- Sky with the 4 Suns: we rise up shut and private with Manchester Collective within the Crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields – live performance overview
- Fantastical & surreal: Thaddeus Strassberger’s imaginative and prescient of Berlioz’ Benvenuto Cellini in Brussels anchored by a heroic efficiency from John Osborn – overview
- Ethel Smyth’s String Trio on Solaire data: Trio d’Iroise draw our focus onto this uncared for piece – document overview
- Residence
