Fred Jacobs is one of the world’s most distinguished lutenists, and he makes a welcome return to the Festival as a member of the continuo team in The Coronation of Poppea and in this solo recital, pairing two of the greatest seventeenth-century composers for the theorbo, the largest and most sonorous member of the lute family, with an extended neck, two sets of strings and two peg-boxes.

In his 2013 SVF recital Fred astonished us with the lute music of the Roman composer Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (c.1580-1651), and now he plays a selection of his equally remarkable theorbo music, full of the expressive and virtuosic writing we associate with the world of Monteverdi. Robert de Visée was the greatest exponent of the theorbo in Louis XIV’s France, a member of the select group that provided private concerts for the king at Versailles.  Fred plays a selection from de Visée’s piéces de theorbo, including delightful arrangements of pieces by Lully and François Couperin and the ‘Allemande La Royalle’, said to be ‘aymé du roy’ – loved by the king.

‘Fred Jacobs’s playing is exquisite, drawing out the full range and depth of the plucked sounds, conjuring up a vanished world of intimacy and grandeur’  The Guardian