GIBBONS & MONTEVERDI /
Double Bill
In Summer 2019, I directed two extraordinary pieces of early music theatre for the Royal Northern College of Music at the stunning Victoria Baths in Manchester, as part of a larger event entitled I hear the rain.
The first piece was Orlando Gibbons’s Cries of London – a dazzling recreation of the cries of street-sellers in 17th-century London. 20+ RNCM students brought these characters to life, in a staging inspired by the Edwardian origins of the Baths.
The second piece was Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, a retelling of a Crusades legend in which a Saracen woman and a Christian man fall in love, but find themselves facing each other in battle. We staged this as if the omniscient narrator Tasso had just plucked two members of the public from the audience and thrust them into the story he was telling, using the full physical geography of the Baths to immerse the audience in the story.
Director – Jonathan Ainscough
Conductor – Roger Hamilton/Stuart Overington
Tasso – Andrew Masterson
Clorinda – Julia Mariko Smith
Tancredi – Phil O’Connor
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