Local singer Hannah Medlam, together with father Charles Medlam on the bass viol, and London thoerbo player William Carter will present a programme of songs and court airs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, interspersed with instrumental items on their period instruments.
Hannah studied singing in Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam and Marseilles, before taking to the opera stage in Holland (Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème), Montpellier (Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen) and Limoges (Lady Pamela in Aubert’s Fra Diabolo). She opted for a period of further study in Rome to improve her bel canto and spoken Italian and is now firmly back on the concert stage with engagements in England, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Japan planned for the 2017/18 season. She sings frequently with London Baroque and has recently discovered the lute song repertoire. She will perform songs for the restoration stage by Henry Purcell, court airs by Michel Lambert, church and chamber works by Monteverdi, and Handel’s only French cantata in imitation of domestic Parisian music-making at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Charles will play a series of bass viol pieces on his 1689 Barack Norman. These will go from the sublime, Marin Marais’ lament for his teacher Jean de St. Colombe, to the ridiculous, a description of a bladder stone operation! The theorbo, also know as the chitarone, is the largest of the lute family instruments and has a series of bass courses, as well as the normal strings above a fingerboard. William Carter will be playing virtuoso music by Johannes Kapsberger, who, in spite of his name, was actually Roman and largely responsible for putting the instrument on the map.
The musicians will introduce their instruments and their sometimes unfamiliar music.
It promises to be a fascinating evening’s music-making in the intimate setting of The Croft Hall in Hungerford.
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