In sweet Musicke is such Art
Killing care and griefe of heart,
Fall asleepe, or hearing, die.

Thus the gushing narrator of ‘Orpheus with his lute’, Thomas Chilcot’s (1707-66) charming setting of a poem from William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, and one of the many songs composed for the musical entertainments that took place throughout the summer months in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, one of the most popular urban refuges of eighteenth-century London. Vauxhall was reopened in 1732 as a dedicated entertainment venue by the enterprising young impresario Jonathan Tyers (1702-67) and quickly became a byword for extravagance, elegance, and, to some extent, the social mobility of a rapidly rising, ever more affluent urban middle class which sought – and found – ‘mirth, freedom and good-humour’ there, as one contemporary account has it. As an artistic crucible, moreover, the gardens brought together a remarkable group of leading contemporary composers, chiefly Thomas Arne (1710-78), Johann Christian Bach (1735-82), William Boyce (1711-79), Thomas Chilcot, and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), a selection of whose vocal and instrumental works The English Concert, directed from the harpsichord by Harry Bicket, presented on the summery evening of 30 May 2012 in the beautiful surroundings of the Foundling Museum’s picture gallery. Joined by soprano Julia Doyle, the ensemble worked their very own brand of Orphic magic – and with the windows opening to a view of green crested plane trees and the distant echoes of a busy London evening encroaching upon, but never quite disrupting, the performance, one could just imagine oneself transported to the twilights of Vauxhall’s leafy groves and fancy hearing the rustle of elegant robes in a light summer breeze.

The evening’s programme included Handel’s Concerto Grosso in D, op. 6 no. 5 (HWV 323), William Boyce’s Symphony no. 8 in d minor, and Thomas Arne’s ravishing cantata, ‘The Morning’ in the first half, and Bach’s ‘Cease awhile ye winds’, Chilcot’s ‘Orpheus with his lute’, and Handel’s Concerto in G minor for oboe and strings (HWV 287) in the second, followed by Thomas Arne’s ‘The Lover’s Recantation’, a typically humorous, mock-pastoral ‘Vauxhall song’ performed with effortless charm by the superb Julia Doyle. Arne is better known for his 1740 setting of James Thomson’s patriotic poem, ‘Rule, Britannia!’, a perennial favourite which seems to defy the anguished soul-searching that has become part and parcel of modern British PC culture. Although tonight’s offerings were of a less controversial nature, there is nevertheless something quintessentially English about the style of composition that focalised around Vauxhall Gardens. Two particularly relevant examples are Arne’s cantata, ‘The Morning’, and Chilcot’s ‘Orpheus with his lute’. The latter forms part of the composer’s ‘Twelve English Songs with their Symphonies’ (1744), a collection of settings of Shakespeare that emerged out of the period’s renewed interest in the playwright, due largely to the celebrated naturalistic performances by the actor manager David Garrick (1717-79) and his long-time collaborator, the actress Hannah Pritchard (1711-68). The song combines a soaring soprano line with pizzicato accompaniment in the strings to achieve the kind of intimate rapport that is usually associated with music written for the lute. As such, Chilcot’s setting translates the key sentiment of the poem – the Orphic creation and subjection of nature – into musical terms. The result is thoroughly entrancing.

Chilcot’s ‘Orpheus’ is surpassed in its musical depiction of nature only by Arne’s spell-binding cantata, ‘The Morning’, in many ways the musical climax of the evening. While Arne uses recitative, dynamics, and word painting to humorous effect in ‘The Lover’s Recantation’ – the song effectually ridicules ‘a lover’s pain and care’, a traditional motif in pastoral poetry – he deploys the same techniques in ‘The Morning’ to create a diverse musical drama in five acts. Each section has its own distinct musical character, a testament to Arne’s theatrical experience and gift for high drama, conveyed brilliantly and very movingly by Boyle and The English Concert. In the opening recitative, for instance, swelling quavers in the strings evoke ‘The glittering sun’ as it ‘begins to rise / On yonder hill, and paints the skies’, an exhilarating piece of word painting which invites parallels with the softly lit landscapes of Claude Lorrain (ca. 1600-82) and his great English imitator, J. W. M. Turner (1775-1851). In the following air, soprano voice and pipe enter into a musical contest as ‘The lark his warbling matin sings’, spurring each other on to create ever more intricate flourishes. And the quick-paced, quasi-syncopated rhythms of the final air, ‘Go, gentle gales’, perfectly combine with the sparing use of coloratura on words like ‘sounding’, ‘sighs’, and ‘waving’, to capture the excitable lover’s state of continuous anxiety, transforming the natural world into an emblem of the lover’s heart. Throughout, Arne displays a virtuoso’s control of his motifs and an astonishing ability to translate both the words and the visual sensations they represent into a musical language that is neither too sentimental, nor too robust. Praise is due not only to Julia Boyle for her superb, fresh, and very moving interpretation, but also to Katy Bircher (flute) for her delicate accompaniment.

The three well-chosen instrumental pieces by Boyce and Handel provided dramatic weight to the evening’s programme. The latter’s Concerto Grosso in D, op. 6 no. 5, one of the six concerti Handel wrote in the autumn of 1739, combines a triumphantly energetic violin part, here supplied artfully by the ensemble’s leader Nadja Zwiener, with intricate moments of dialogue between the various instrument groups. As Felix Warnock writes in the programme notes, the piece looks to the popular concertos of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) for form and structure, but the overall effect is nevertheless one of excitement and novelty, particularly in the fast-paced ‘Allegro’ movement.

Katharina Spreckelsen’s rendering of the Concerto in G minor for oboe and strings, was, as usual, a master-class in style and virtuosity. The work is thought to have been composed by the eighteen-year-old Handel in or around 1703, but it already reflects some of his signature grasp of melodic diversity. The opening movement, ‘Grave’, with its languid, drawn out lines in the solo part, demands the utmost in technique and expressivity, while the following ‘Allegro’ explodes into a fireworks of fast semiquaver runs, followed in turn by a deceptively simple, hauntingly lyrical ‘Sarabande’. The final ‘Allegro’ combines several motifs articulated in the previous movements and ends on a peculiarly understated dramatic flourish. Altogether, this is a surprising piece, and what sticks in mind particularly is Spreckelsen’s astonishing ability to negotiate its range of different moods with apparent ease and characteristic nonchalance, a joy both to watch and to listen to.

Compared to Handel’s concerti, William Boyce’s Symphony no. 8 in D minor, the final symphony in a set of eight composed between 1740 and 1756, seems almost brutal in character. Its three principal movements, grandiloquently entitled ‘Pomposo-allegro’, ‘Largo (andante)’, and ‘Tempo di gavotte (risoluto)’, cycle through French and Italian influences to culminate in what Warnock calls Boyce’s signature ‘sturdy Englishness’. The symphony is dramatic, dark in places, and the pulsating, relentless rhythms which bind the three movements together seem oddly but engagingly defiant. Here, and throughout the evening, the English Concert demonstrated an extraordinarily fresh and energetic approach to the music, which lifted the piece from what could be misconstrued as manufactured heaviness into palpable and infectious elation.

According to the Foundling Museum’s current summer exhibition, in conjunction with which this concert took place, Vauxhall Gardens pronounced The Triumph of Pleasure. Tonight’s performance by The English Concert and soloists Julia Doyle and Katharina Spreckelsen certainly did so in no uncertain terms. Yet for all its ephemerality, the music written for Vauxhall by Arne, Boyce, Chilcot, Handel, and their contemporaries holds an important and substantial lesson in a time and age where words like ‘happiness index’ and ‘life satisfaction’ jar with the stark economic realities created by our very own, albeit somewhat perverted, version of the pleasure garden: the global village. Through their music, the composers associated with Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens articulated a politics of pleasure that was as escapist as it was programmatic. It reminds us that art and commerce exist side by side, that the timeless is contingent upon the timely, and above all, that cultural work in whatever form is, and has to be, essentially political.