A pre concert talk by Mark Bills

The painter Thomas Gainsborough was intensely musical and included musicians in his circle of friends, including Charles Frederick Abel and John Christian Bach. We explore music composed by Gainsborough’s friends, much of it performed at the Bach-Abel concerts.

We contrast festive anthems, carols and other sacred music for voices and viols by Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, John Amner, Martin Peerson and George Jeffreys with seasonal secular music bringing Shakespeare’s England vividly to life, including arrangements of popular songs by Thomas Ravenscroft and Richard Dering.

The programme consists of five masterpieces from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the piano was developing rapidly and composers were revelling in the the possibilities it offered them.