VIRTUAL Salon to Feature 17th-Century England

Apparently, my announcement of the next performance in the PBO/VIRTUAL Salon Series, one of the streamed offerings of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) & Chorale, was either premature or just plain incorrect. I had previously announced that the second concert in this series was scheduled for April 22, two weeks after the first concert on April 8. Now it appears that the interval is one month, rather than two weeks, meaning that the next streamed recital in this series will take place this coming Thursday.

This recital has been given the somewhat prankish title GIBBONS/BLOW: What? … No Purcell?!, and it will present two compositions by each of two seventeenth-century English composers. The second of these composers is John Blow, a name that is probably familiar to aficionados of early music. The Gibbons in the title, however, is not the better-known Orlando Gibbons, a well-known composer of English madrigals. Rather, the selections will be by Gibbons’ son John. He will be represented by a four-part fantasy in A minor, which will be performed by violinists Katherine Kyme and Carla Moore, violist Maria Caswell, and William Skeen on gamba. His other composition will be a “fantasy suite,” scored for two violins, gamba, and continuo (to be taken by Jory Vinikour at the harpsichord). The Blow compositions will be a chaconne in G major and a suite of instrumental music from the opera Venus and Adonis.

This video will be streamed this coming Thursday, May 6, at 8 p.m. The entire program should last about half an hour. The performances will be recorded from the Herbst Theatre stage. All necessary information can be found on the Web page for this concert. This includes a “coming soon” button, which will link to the video Web page in time for the performance. There are also three useful pull-down menus. These include one for the content of the entire program, one for program notes written by Scholar-in-Residence Bruce Lamott, and one for a glossary (also by Lamott, which may be consulted while reading his notes).