SONGS OF TRAVEL

Welcome to our 2022 / 23 season, Songs of Travel. It is the final instalment of our ‘Six Chapters of Enlightenment’ series here at the Southbank Centre.

The idea of a journey excites us all. Whether it is a new adventure or one we have made dozens of times before. Travel and the idea of leaving home left a deep impression on the British and European mindset in the 17th and 18th centuries. And, of course, it is one of the great literary metaphors with the promise of discovering something about ourselves on the way to our destination.

The 18th century was a whirlwind of correspondences. International navigation was leaping forward with Captain James Cook’s maritime expeditions whilst newspapers, novels and engravings were distributing ideas and images in a manner previously unparalleled. As a result, the intellectual aspiration of the common man gained a wholly new stride. One which would reach beyond the bounds of the immediate and conventional into new realms of existence: far off lands, radical political thought, belief beyond convention and transports of the artistic soul which would make the desperate leap into the passions and turmoil of romanticism. The song of travel eventually becomes the realisation of self as hero in the flight from non-social space to the strange and wonderful of the 19th century: exoticism, opiate dreams, mesmerism, madness and the supernatural.

The music we’ve selected for the season reflects journeys that are physical and of the mind. It is the work of creative thinkers that were able to imagine unknown places through the descriptions of others, to put the fantastical to use to satirise the contemporary, to reimagine the past in new ways, to explore our individual freedom, our sense of collective belonging, and the need to travel to find their own place in the world, a journey many of us still make today.

Thank you for joining us today and supporting not just the OAE but live performance by the whole cultural community. Music by its very existence is about community and shared journeys, an adventure that looks beyond that which divides us to seek joy in common belief.

Ian Bostridge

It seems like I’ve been singing Handel’s music for ever. As a boy, telling the story of the shepherds and the angels in the Messiah; or as a novice teenage Acis succumbing to Polyphemus’s jealous blows. I’ve been singing Handel with the amazing players of the OAE for a long time too (we made a disc of arias together some years ago).

This particular programme reflects the ways in which Handel the cosmopolitan – born in Germany, active in Italy, settled in London as an icon of Hanoverian Protestant rule –ranged across time and place in his operas. Some of these stories are mythical, like Acis and Galatea; some classical, like Julius Caesar in Egypt; some from less familiar periods of history, like the conflict between the Central Asian conqueror Tamerlano –also know as Tamburlaine or Timur – and the Ottoman emperor Bayezid I or Bajazet; or the late 7th Century rivalry between the Lombard king Bertarido and Grimoaldo, Duke of Benevento.

The programme was originally mooted as a sort of musical demonstration against the barriers to cultural exchange which musicians have seen erected in recent years. We had hoped to undertake a tour which would take in Europe, Tamburlaine’s domains in Central Asia, and East Asia. If visa complexities made this tricky, war in Europe has made it impossible. We can only range across the continent in our imaginations, aided by Handel’s music. Juxtaposed with instrumental pieces, we present a mixture of the effortlessly charming and melodic – Acis’s pastoral longing or ‘Un momento di contento’ from Alcina – with some of the darkest and most dramatic music Handel ever wrote. Castrati often played the heroes in Handel’s Italian operas, but for the great Modenese tenor Francesco Borosini he wrote two extraordinary and anguished roles: the defeated emperor Bajazet, who takes his own life and bids farewell to his daughter; and the tyrannical usurper Grimoaldo, whose conscience begins to stir. A bracing alternative aria for Sesto from Giulio Cesare reminds us that tenors were sometimes brought in to replace absent mezzos, male or female. In the case of the final aria, ‘Scherza Infida’ from Ariodante I have simply stolen from the higher octave one of the greatest pieces Handel ever wrote.