Phantasm

In Three Gifts for London, Phantasm celebrates consort music composed on the Thames.

John Ward worked for Henry Fanshawe, a key figure in the court of Henry, Prince of Wales, who inspired viol fantasies indebted to his passion for Italian painting and fashion.

In William Lawes’s Consort Sets, we enter the King’s Privy Apartments where Charles I encouraged Lawes’s daring harmonies to be heard only by his most intimate courtiers. And in Henry Purcell’s Fantasias, we recreate the modern experiments of a 20-year-old genius, who had made a deep study of manuscripts in the Chapel Royal library.