Madrigals

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 10

Madrigals

E are perhaps inclined to think of the Elizabethan Age as a lusty one, an age when life was richer and yet less highly prized, when for a penny you could see Macbeth at the Globe (with perhaps Will Shakespeare playing the Second Murderer), and for nothing the heads rotting on their spikes outside the Tower. It seems an age when life was lived at first hand, when men were not afraid of the grander emotions, and need not flinch from the agony of Lear or even the rhodomontade of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. And I think we tend to forget that the Elizabethan age was also a highly artificial one, that Euphues flourished as well as Shakespeare, that Shakespeare treated of the woes of Corydon as well as those of Hamlet. It is this delightfully Arcadian aspect of Elizabethan England. that was recalled by a programme of Elizabethan music I heard from 2YA last Thursday night, one of a series of several studio recitals by four well-known Wellington singers. The madrigals and airs were tuneful and charming, and though lacking the richness and variety made possible by the freedom of modern harmony seemed perfectly suited to the Dresden-china fragility of their themes.