Output details

John Blow: Venus and Adonis

Research content/process:

This project sought to redress the critical balance between Venus and Adonis and Dido and Aeneas by exploring the former’s significance as a masque, in a modern context in which the expensive theatrical shows of a small aristocratic circle seem unpromisingly irrelevant. The female vocal virtuosity of original performers Mary Davies (Venus) and Lady Mary Tudor (Cupid) was foregrounded in rehearsals and performance, and put an entirely different complexion on the work's origins. This project was the first to use the new Purcell Society edition, with Bruce Wood an integral collaborator. Using Kenny’s research into virtuoso aristocratic and amateur female singing, to which manuscript songbooks attest, the career of Mary Davies was taken as model for modern performance. Singers internalised the style during rehearsal, while players developed French-style improvisation practices common in the masque. No previous modern performances had used a girl Cupid of a similar age to Lady Mary Tudor. Kenny used thirteen- to fifteen-year-old soloists in Oxford, York and Southampton to explore the effect of using a soloist this young. Arts Council England and the National Centre for Early Music supported research and development of a national educational project, from which teams of schoolchild Cupids were recruited to further match seventeenth-century performance practice. This also helped define the masque in terms relevant to modern performance: the BBC recording (included in supporting material, broadcast on Radio 3 in 2010) contained interviews with participating children, emphasising their dual identity as children and as actors in the way that was central to the tradition of the masque. The active engagement of audience (parents, schools and communities) was analogous to the invited audience-participants of courtly entertainments, in a creative re-engagement with the masque's theatrical aspects, rather than the political elements that have overwhelmingly dominated modern scholarship on the genre.