David Hatcher: The Ape, the Monkey and the Baboon

DAVID HATCHER AND FRIENDS

David Hatcher, Claire Horáček, Tim Lin – viols

The Ape, the Monkey, and the Baboon

A celebration of the music of William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes.

These two great English composers were contemporaries thanks to the extreme longevity of William Byrd. They both died exactly 400 years ago, Byrd at the age of eighty-three and Weelkes at around sixty-seven. They both navigated troubled times, with differing degrees of success. Byrd successfully maintained his catholicism in an age of dangerous intolerance, whilst Weelkes’s erratic behaviour led him to be “…noted and famed for a comon drunckard and notorious swearer & blasphemer”.

This programme explores the works of these two contrasting figures and their contemporaries through music for one, two and three viols, performed by three members of the Linarol Consort. The title is taken from Weelkes “Ayeres or Phantasticke Spirites” of 1608.  Who is the Ape, the Monkey or the Baboon, is for you to decide.