Baroque Summer School 2025 - Weldon/Purcell The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island

Weldon/Purcell The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island

Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is the inspiration for this year’s Summer School, once again in collaboration with the Academy of Ancient Music. We will perform the semi-opera The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, composed almost certainly by John Weldon and that includes songs by Henry Purcell. An outstanding example of post-Restoration theatre, this work has not had the prominence in the repertoire that it deserves, partly as a result of uncertainty over the composer’s identity!

We will interleave the songs and dances that Weldon and Purcell have left us with other music by Purcell and his contemporaries including Locke’s Music from the Tempest. If you want to sing a solo, just bring your favourite Purcell songs and we will endeavour to include some of them. We will also perform Purcell’s anthems ‘Thou knowst Lord’ and ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway’, sometimes called the Bell Anthem, as well as the Rondeau from Abdelazar.

Following on from the success of last year’s staged production of Campra’s L’Europe Galante, this year’s course gives us a rare opportunity to focus once more on the glorious musical epoch that followed the Restoration of the monarchy after years of a culturally starved Commonwealth. We will closely examine instrumental and vocal treatises to allow students to perform this beautiful and eloquent musical language with greater authority.


Students will have the opportunity to work with a dynamic faculty including an inspirational dance specialist whose research and expertise is inspiring musicians to look afresh at the dance music which is at the heart of the Baroque repertoire.

Learn more about our Baroque Summer School: https://www.cambridgeearlymusic.org/baroque-summer-school/

You may also like the following events from Cambridge Early Music:

• Next month, 26th July, 06:30 pm, Weldon's The Tempest in Cambridge
• Next month, 27th July, 04:00 pm, Renaissance Summer School 2025 - Charles V and the Spanish Golden Age in Hitchin

Also check out other Music events in Hitchin, Workshops in Hitchin.