´óÏó´«Ã½

For Sounds of Shakespeare Tom Service presents this week’s edition of Music Matters live from the Radio 3 pop-up studio at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. Joined in the box by the theatre historian Sarah Lenton and composer Gary Carpenter, Tom explores various aspects of Shakespeare’s relationship with music, from Elizabethan times to today. Including material from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ archives featuring the late Guy Woolfenden, who composed more than 150 scores for the RSC during his 37 years as Head of Music, plus Benjamin Britten interviewed in 1960 before the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and John Dankworth talking in the 60s about the Shakespeare settings he wrote for Cleo Laine.

What do we know about the use of music in theatres during Shakespeare’s lifetime? Tom delves into the past with Christopher Wilson, musicologist and research director of Hull University’s extensive database of musical references in Shakespeare’s works, and travels to the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse theatre in London with the early music specialist and composer William Lyons, to explore the sounds and instruments that Shakespeare’s audiences might have heard.

More information:

Live in the pop-up studio in Stratford-upon-Avon, the theatre historian Sarah Lenton tells Tom how composers like Verdi and Berlioz understood the essence of Shakespeare without a working knowledge of English, and often without access to good translations. She also explains her theory that the best Shakespearean stage works feature no words at all.

Shakespeare’s words are full of music. Throughout the plays, poems and sonnets, he demonstrates a unique understanding for rhythm and the musical possibilities of vocal sounds. Tom explores Shakespeare’s musical language with Cicely Berry, the RSC’s voice director for over 40 years, and the theatre expert David Roesner, and the actor and singer Jessie Buckley recites from The Winter’s Tale.

Live in the pop-up studio, Tom talks to the composer Gary Carpenter, whose non-Shakespearean works include four operas, five musicals and several ballets. His four volumes of Shakespeare songs for chorus, The Food Of Love, were commissioned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to celebrate the anniversaries of Shakespeare’s birth and death in 2014 and 2016.