The Glasshouse

“Everything is crazy!” wrote the French philosopher Charles de Brosses in 1740, gazing ruefully at the state of modern music. Audiences, he lamented, loved “myth, enchantments and magic…the full range of festivities, dances and spectacle”. And if that actually sounds like a lot of fun, you’re in for a treat. Tonight’s concert is an all-expenses-paid Grand Tour of the most fashionable centres of musical Europe in the baroque era: a time of dazzling virtuosos, mythological wonders and eye-popping spectacle. We’ll travel to London, Paris and Rome, and experience the festive season in an age when nothing succeeded like excess.

Paris first, where Jean-Philippe Rameau had courted controversy even at school – disrupting lessons by bursting into song. From the 1730s onwards, he split musical Paris in two: “Rameau is singular, brilliant, complex, clever – too clever sometimes” declared the philosopher Denis Diderot but Rameau never held back. In his opera Dardanus (1739) a hero in a flying chariot defeats a sea-monster. Les Fêtes d’Hébé (1739) featured a dance of sensuous nymphs and Platée (1745) tells the story of a frog princess. Naïs (1749) ends in the fabulous undersea palace of the god Neptune himself.

Rameau gambled on his genius and won, but not all of his colleagues were so lucky. The brilliant violinist-composer Jean-Marie Leclair – who wrote this sparky concerto to show off his own skill – was murdered in a Paris street, possibly (the mystery remains unsolved) by a jealous colleague. Like many aspiring composers, Leclair had studied in Italy, where Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerti Grossi Op.6, published in Rome in 1714, had astonished all Europe and set a new standard of violin playing.

But Corelli was only one of many Italian trendsetters: according to one contemporary his protégé Pietro Locatelli played the violin so beautifully that he could “make a canary fall from its perch in a swoon of pleasure”. Like Corelli, and like their earlier predecessor Giuseppe Torelli of Bologna, Locatelli composed a “Christmas” concerto grosso, in which nocturnal melancholy gives way to the gentle sway of a pastorale; a musical evocation both of the infant Christ in his cradle, and the shepherds who were the first to learn of his coming.

Georg Philipp Telemann is the odd man out here; a friend of Johann Sebastian Bach who made his career in the bustling German seaport of Hamburg. But he had musical friends across Europe, and he worked tirelessly to entertain both his performers and his public – as this Viola Concerto demonstrates. He was in regular contact with London, where the adopted Briton Handel had succeeded Henry Purcell to the title of “the English Orpheus”. This second of George Frideric Handel’s Twelve Grand Concertos of 1739 takes Corelli’s flamboyance to the next level.

A generation earlier, Henry Purcell’s 1692 “semi-opera” The Fairy Queen had taken A Midsummer Night’s Dream and decked it out with all the fantasy and spectacle of the Restoration stage at its most sumptuous. William Shakespeare was left more or less untouched. Instead, Purcell composed music between the acts, and inserted a series of masques: miniature song-and-dance extravaganzas which, while they stretch the whole evening out to the best part of five hours, allowed him to write some of the most gorgeous music of his – or any – age.

Royal Northern Sinfonia

Internationally renowned, calling Gateshead home.

37 musicians at the top of their game. Electrifying music, old and new. All the talent, determination, and creativity of the North East on a worldwide stage. From their home at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Royal Northern Sinfonia share the joy and wonder of orchestral music with thousands of people across the North of England – and beyond – every year.

From symphonies to string quartets, film soundtracks to choral masses, and original performances with awesome artists from Sheku Kanneh-Mason to Self Esteem, the orchestra’s members have got one of the most varied jobs there is. They’re always looking for fresh new sounds from up-and-coming composers, inviting local communities to share a stage, and doing everything they can to inspire and prepare the musicians of tomorrow to one day take their place.

They’re also working hard to smash the barriers that can stop brilliant people getting into classical music. They’ve teamed up with national partners to support women conductors to develop their careers, to help global majority musicians get vital experience in the orchestra world, and to celebrate disabled and non-disabled musicians breaking new ground together in inclusive ensemble RNS Moves. And they bring new musical opportunities to the region, headlining the first-ever BBC Proms weekend outside London.

Because they whole-heartedly believe orchestral music is for anyone – big cities and rural villages, tiny babies and life-long listeners, die-hard fans and curious minds – they travel far and wide to make sure there’s top-notch classical music on offer for anyone ready to say, “I’ll give that a go”. You’ll find them in churches, castles, and community venues across the North, as well as leading the charge in Carlisle, Kendal, Middlesbrough, and Sunderland.

With 65 years of success to build on, they’ve signed a dynamic artistic leadership – Music Director Dinis Sousa, Artistic Partner Maria Włoszczowska, Principal Guest Conductor Nil Venditti and Associate Conductor Ellie Slorach – to lead the way into a bold, bright future. Wherever the orchestra play and whoever they share a stage with, every performance is a chance to see, hear and feel the music.