Love is Come Again: Music for the Springhead Easter Play

Soli Peo Gloria

At the heart of this Easter curiosity is the “creative vision of a Dorset mother and son.” The latter is Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who created in the 1960s, during his Cambridge undergraduate years, an Easter pageant in his home village with his mother, bringing his nascent Monteverdi Choir to weave a sequence of plainchant, motets and carols around mimed theatre created by Marabel Gardiner. This recreation of music for the Springhead Easter Play (named after the Gardiner house) contains moments of striking contrast, from the shock-horror harmonic eccentricities of Gesualdo (O vos omnes) and the extravagant fullness of John Taverner’s Dum transisset Sabbatum, to the simplicity of the French carol Love is come again and chattering exuberance of Schütz’s Verily the Lord is Risen .The performances by the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are beautiful and exhilarating. The whole concept is quaintly alluring.