Summer Concert Series, Strawberry Hill House

Gardens and music have a natural affinity, appealing to the senses and not dependent on the spoken word for their impact. And many an opera depends on a garden scene to make everything come right in the end.

Making everything right at Strawberry Hill this summer is a series of concerts with music inspired by or reflecting the pleasures of the garden, and with the great landscaping spread out alongside the Gothic manor house of Strawberry Hill, the evenings promise to be enchanted.

A concert entitled Illumination of Spring Gardens on 23 June features the violinist Calin Andrei and viola player Katya Lazareva, performing works by Bach, Mozart and Martinu that evoke the atmosphere of the 18th-century pleasure garden. The also play music by the less well-known German composer Jan Kalivoda.

On 30 June, the Baroque ensemble Follia will also conjure up the sounds of the pleasure garden in their programme, Into This Enchanted Place ... They play music by Handel, JC Bach, Mozart and Thomas Chilcot.

Enchanted Gardens in the 16th and 18th Century is the title of the concert by the remarkable harpsichordist Yeo Yat-Soon, on 14 July. Byrd, William Lawes, Couperin and Handel are among his composers. Yeo Yat-Soon also performs with La Follia.



Gerald Place (tenor) and Dorothy Linell (lute) sing, play and recite on a Shakespearean theme on 28 July

Really unusual instruments are a feature of the concert on 21 July, when Rosemary Edwards plays the Baroque cello, Mike Parker plays the single-action harp and William Summers joins them on the one-keyed flute. In Airs for the Season they will be laying suites by James Oswald and pieces that were considered cutting edge in the late 18th century.

The series ends on 28 July with Let Us Garlands Bring: A Garden for Shakespeare, in which Gerald Place (tenor) and lutenist Dorothy Linell perform songs and instrumental music by Dowland, Johnson, Campian and Morley, and choose poetry and prose by Shakespeare, Spenser and Bacon.