The Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music runs from May 10 to 18 in London. Artistic director Lindsay Kemp writes about this year's theme of 'Nature'.

The sun shines on my garden as I write. Buds are bursting, birds are singing, bees drone over the borders (reminding me that I need to get out and weed them). Spring is finally here after the wintry awfulness of March, when nature seemed to playing a cruel joke on me and my Radio 3 colleagues as we struggled through wind, rain and snow (yes, snow) in the furtherance of our month-long ‘Baroque Spring’ season. But now we are into May, and the annual ritual of natural renewal is at last making its presence felt.  

I confess I’m relieved. It seems daft to have feared that spring could somehow go missing, but the thought did nag at the back of my mind for a while. We all know spring will come in the end, but that doesn’t make the proof that ‘the world’s still working’ (as Ted Hughes put it in his celebration of swifts returning in May) any less valuable.

But then, having allowed irrational ideas about spring’s heartless non-appearance to trouble me, I think I can allow myself the equally fanciful notion that its final arrival is perhaps nature’s reward for dedicating an entire festival to it. If March’s iciness made Jobs of us all, then maybe the return of the sun’s warmth could be put down to the gods smiling on a combination of my stoicism and the offering that is this year’s Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. Well why not? Every little helps, you know. And have you never formed just such a crackpot theory of your own about what influences the weather?            

Drawing together a nature theme for this year’s festival has been a fun pastime for me ever since I first hit on the idea. I can’t remember what the precise impetus was: was it receiving violinist Enrico Onofri’s beautifully conceived programme suggestion for a concert placing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as the end-point of a clutch of 17th-century descriptive nature pieces, or was it just being struck by the phrase ‘’Tis nature’s voice’, the title of the showstopper aria from Purcell’s Cecilian ode Hail, bright Cecilia? Both works I have duly included, but as further ideas continued to tumble into my notebook, I knew that I had a workable theme of the type I like best: extra-musical yet meaningful, comprehendible to all, and capable of being reflected in ways that throw up plenty of varied and wonderful music.
    
I rather like, too, the fact that some people have found it a surprising choice for a Baroque festival. ‘Wasn’t it the Romantics who were into nature?’ they ask. Well yes, but that doesn’t mean that artists and musicians of earlier years didn’t use their senses too. Vivaldi certainly did, but so did composers such as Monteverdi, Merula and Moulinié, to name just three of those who appear in Ensemble La Fenice’s programme ‘The Song of the Birds’. The charms of nature – even if chiefly as a background for human interaction – coloured the fantasies of the 18th-century French, whose dreamily imagined fêtes champêtres are evoked in concerts by Florilegium and Le Jardin Secret. And the unpredictable friend and foe that was the sea inspired many an operatic metaphor and stormy ritornello, as the festival’s closing concert, given by the peerless Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and soprano Carolyn Sampson, demonstrates. And how lovely it is to have a perfect excuse to open a festival with one of Handel’s most underrated oratorios, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato! Milton’s odes to opposing sides of human nature are full of supporting imagery offering a rich depiction of the landscape of pre-industrial England. Writing of the piece, Winton Dean wondered at its ‘kaleidoscopic view of fields, rivers, hill and towns, not to mention, sun, moon and stars’, enough in his opinion to make Handel ‘the supreme nature poet in music’. Now there’s something to argue about.

Harpsichordist Andreas Staier performs works from his recent album for Harmonia Mundi, '... pour passer la Mélancolie', at this year's Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. Hear the Gigue from Froberger's Suite XXX en la mineur on the Gramophone Player below: