This Wednesday we return to the Prendergast schools in Lewisham with another workshop focusing on vocal music – this time we’ll be looking deeply into the chorus from Messiah, ‘And the glory of the Lord’, which is a GCSE set work. One of Solomon’s Knot’s main aims is to brings vocal music closer to people, and there will be eight of us there to sing it with the students and really see how Handel put it together.
A few weeks ago we were in residence at Goldsmith’s College to perform a lecture-concert at the symposium “Safeguarding the Intangible: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Music and Heritage” in collaboration with Naomi Matsumoto, a musicologist with whom we have been working over the last few years with a view to mounting a staged production of the anonymous ‘dramma burlesco’, Lo spedale. More on that anon...
Finally, this Friday we shall be performing the musical sections of a very interesting piece, a Jesuit drama from 1698 Vienna called Mulier fortis, which describes the life and death of the 16th-century Japanese Jesuit martyr Gracia Hosokawa, as part of the conference ‘Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia, and the Americas’, which is being organised by the University of Western Australia, and hosted by Trinity College, Cambridge. The singers of Solomon’s Knot will assume such roles as Fury, Cruelty, Regret, Adversity and Constancy. Pretty much what we have to deal with on a daily basis then!