John Come Kiss Me Now

Counterpoint and popular melodies: these again will be at the heart of the second concert with commentary that Andreas Staier will devote to William Byrd, a composer with whom the musician shares a long and secret complicity, ever since the day when as a 15-year-old lad he found in a music store in his native town an anthology with a strange name: The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. This collection of Elizabethan music — one of the main sources for Byrd’s keyboard music — was also the origin of the young Andreas’ interest in the repertoire and in the instrument to which he would be destined… Around some 16 variations of John Come Kiss Me Now, the keyboardist weaves one of his subtly crafted programmes, with a focus on a certain inimitable essence of popular English melody, an ambling quality that can be found strolling through Byrd’s Woods So Wilde, or the Norwegian Woodsof another talented group of English lads…