Catching lightning: Solomon’s Knot explore George Jefferys & the birth of the English Baroque at Wigmore Hall

Solomon’s Knot at Kirby Hall in 2023

George Jefferys & the Birth of the English Baroque; Solomon’s Knot, James Garnon, Helen Schlesinger, writer & director: Federay Holmes; Wigmore Hall
Reviewed 24 February 2025

A dramatised presentation that brought to life the almost forgotten English composer George Jeffreys and his turbulent times, illuminating his impassioned, Italianate music

George Jefferys, the most important English Baroque composer between Byrd and Purcell, still remains a name that many have not heard of. But thankfully, he seems to be having something of a moment. In 2024, Solomon’s Knot released an album of Jefferys’s music on Prospero Classical [see my review] and I chatted to organist William Whitehead about his enthusiasm for Jefferys’s music [see my interview].

Now Solomon’s Knot has developed a live programme based on Jefferys’s music, collaborating with director and writer Federay Holmes (an associate artist of Shakespeare’s Globe) and actors James Garnon and Helen Schlesinger. George Jefferys & the Birth of the English Baroque was performed at Wigmore Hall on 24 February 2026. The evening wove together works Jefferys’ and other composeers with a dramatic presentation of Jefferys’s life with Garnon as the composer and Schlesinger playing his wife and Lady Hatton, the wife of his patron. The singers were Zoe Brookshaw, Clare Lloyd-Griffiths, Kate Symonds-Joy, James Robinson, David de Winter and Jonathan Sells. James Robinson was replacing tenor Thomas Herford who was unwell, though some of Herford’s solos were sung by David de Winter.

In her programme note, Federay Holmes points out that if Jefferys’s scores and part books had been lost or destroyed then we would have known him only as the unremarkable Steward of the Hatton family working away at Kirby Hall. Jefferys’s surviving letters to Lord Hatton, Lady Hatton and their son cover the 1630s to the 1680s, yet none mentions music. We know a lot about Jefferys, relating to his work as steward, and we know the music he was writing and copying. But we have no texts to link the two.

To solve this, and provide context for the audience, Holmes created her dramatic presentation which was anchored by James Garnon’s terrific performance as Jefferys, rightly dominating the stage whether talking or listening to music. There is a sense of impassioned religious devotion to Jefferys’s music allied to his drawing inspiration from the Italian masters whose work his patrons had collected. Holmes’s drama provided a convincing context for this. It is worth bearing in mind that for all the power of Jefferys’s music, we have no real idea why he wrote it or for whom, but we have to assume that the household at Kirby Hall included suitable singers for his pieces. These are no Jacobean consort songs in the English manner but draw genuine inspiration from the Italian composers in a way that was remarkable.

The drama took us from Jefferys’s early years in Oxford leading into the period when King Charles took the Court there, then the King’s execution and Jefferys’s appointment as Steward at Kirby. This led to disquisitions on Parliament and Puritanism, the financial problems when the Hattons estates were sequestered, and the later period when King Charles II was restored but Lord Hatton remained out of favour and Jefferys never got a place at Court.

Sometimes Holmes’s imagination seemed to include wilder flights of fancy – did we really need Lady Hatton fantasising about what the spirits of King Charles I and his brother Prince Henry would say to each other in the afterlife? But anchoring it all was a powerful and highly believable portrait of Jefferys himself as incarnated by Garnon, ably supported by Schlesinger in various roles.

Musically we began with Byrd, and an English contrafactum of Civitas sancti which helped set the musical world that Jefferys arose from. The penultimate piece in the whole programme was Purcell’s Sonata in Three Parts No. 1 in G minor, one of the set that Purcell had published and which were amongst the final things that Jefferys copied.

In between was a whole range of his work. Threading their way through the programme were his settings of English poetical religious texts (mainly anonymous) – How wretched is the state; A Music Strange (Pentecost); Whisper it easily (Passiontide); The Lord in Adversity; Look up, all eyes (Ascension). Intimate works for four or five singers and continuo, whilst they might seem to fit in the tradition of the English consort song there was little of that here. Instead, Jefferys’s Italian influences were to the fore and these evoked very much the Italian madrigal. Yet what was also fascinating was the way that, no matter how intense the main body of the work, Jefferys could find an element of radiance or passionate intensity in the closing pages. In a world where public music was largely forbidden and private music highly controlled, there must have been something wonderful about sitting in the Great Hall at Kirby and hearing a highly personal performance of these pieces.

Jefferys’s Italianate roots were also apparent in the cantata Felice pastorella (Happy the shepherdess) with its Italian text and writing for three soloists – tenor David de Winter, bass Jonathan Sells and soprano Clare Lloyd-Griffiths. David de Winter, standing in for Thomas Herford and using music, did an excellent job and all three soloists were engaging in this piece which seemed to be Jefferys emulating the Italian masters whose music was in the Kirby library. The other non-English language piece was the Latin texted O quam jucundum for four voices and continuo. Despite the liturgical Latin text, the piece sounded much more like a madrigal and received a vibrant performance. I noted that the singers were using non-standard, presumably period pronunciation for the Latin.

Overall, I thought perhaps that the balance could have been tipped in favour of the music more with slightly less spoken passages. Also, I felt that some details in Holmes’s drama were tricky to apprehend and it seemed to be assumed that you had read and digested her comprehensive programme note first.

But this was a fascinating and engaging experiment that succeeded in bringing a relatively forgotten English composer to life. I do hope that Solomon’s Knot’s espousal of Jefferys’s music will lead to all manner of further performances.