Theorbo Time

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You don’t see a theorbo for years and then two come along together. About ten years ago I went to a concert at St Paul’s School to raise money for Venice in Peril.

Il Complesso Barocco, then led by Alan Curtis, came from Italy with contralto Sara Mingardo and American author Donna Leon. Appropriately SM is a Venetian by birth and DL by adoption. The detective stories which have won her fame and money are set in and around Venice. It takes a bit of organisation to bring an orchestra by air to the UK. A list of their instruments had to be submitted to the airline. My ViP friend noticed “theorbo” and amended it to “two oboes”. There was room for it on the ‘plane when it turned up unexpectedly and there was just room for it in a Volvo estate for the journey from the airport into London. That was my introduction to this ancient instrument.

St Mary’s Church in Hadleigh had a concert performance of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea on Saturday night and up popped a theorbo, played by Fred Jacobs, a member of The John Jenkins Consort. The orchestra is named after East Anglia’s greatest Baroque composer, John Jenkins, born in 1592. He had a long life living until 1678. He died at Sir Philip Wodehouse’s house at Kimberley in Norfolk where he is buried. Here is the inscription on his grave.

Under this Stone Rare Jenkins lie
The Master of the Musick Art
Whom from the Earth the God on High
Called up to Him to bear his part.
Aged eighty six October twenty seven
In anno seventy eight he went to Heaven

Sir Philip, who employed JJ at the end of his life, is of course an ancestor of PG Wodehouse. But we are not done with the theorbo, our cup overfloweth with them. On Sunday night there is a solo theorbo Recital in Nayland church. Well actually it is the same theorbo played by Fred Jacobs. He’s going to play work by the Roman composer Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (c. 1580-1651), and Robert de Visée who was the greatest exponent of the theorbo in Louis XIV’s France. The Guardian promises that ‘Fred Jacobs’s playing is exquisite, drawing out the full range and depth of the plucked sounds, conjuring up a vanished world of intimacy and grandeur’, but it may just be a lot of plink-plonk twanging to my ears, untutored in the subtleties of the theorbo. However, it will be a chance to see another Suffolk church built with money from the cloth trade in the 15th century.