Continuo Connect — Concert // Ensemble Hesperi: Full of the Highland Humours

This programme presents music from our debut CD, “Full of the Highland Humours”, which celebrates the immense success Scottish music enjoyed in eighteenth-century London. In 1700 the first known collection of Scots Tunes was printed in London by the celebrated music publisher Henry Playford. Ever the savvy advertiser, Playford claimed in the title that the music contained therein was ‘Full of the Highland Humours’.

Highlights include rarely recorded works by James Oswald, a highly successful Scottish composer who made London his ‘home from home’ in the 1740s. His "Airs for the Seasons" are delightful miniatures, each named after a plant that blooms in the appropriate season. Also featured are sparkling trio sonatas by Giuseppe Sammartini, a close colleague of Oswald’s, and by their contemporary, Francesco Geminiani, who admired Scottish music so much that his "Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick" featured entirely his own arrangements of popular Scots tunes. We also showcase the music of Thomas Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie, a talented aristocrat whose enthusiasm for local music-making in Fife earned him the nickname ‘Fiddler Tam’, and by Robert Bremner, an enterprising Scottish publisher and composer whose influence in London and Edinburgh helped to cement the musical relationship between the two cities.