Philip Pickett & New London Consort: Purcell's 'The Tempest'

About the Event

2014 marks the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. And after more than four centuries, his plays remain as timely as ever, never ceasing to be performed and adapted.

This has been very much the case with his The Tempest, retouched in 1667 by John Dryden (who gave Purcell the libretto of King Arthur) and William Davenant, who made something of an opera from it, a sort of theater piece supplemented with song and dance. In its turn, Dryden and Davenant's version was supplanted by additional reworkings by such musicians as Purcell, John Weldon, and Pelham Humfrey.

After extensive research, Philip Pickett and his colleagues of the New London Consort have recreated the music as it would have been performed around 1700. The moving evocations of its unrelenting winds have lost none of their force.