Alison Balsom in Gabriel

Balsom’s performances of Purcell, Handel and their contemporaries give heart and soul to a bustling, exuberant entertainment; a breathtaking evocation of baroque London in all its colour, clamour, diversity and glorious chaos. Characters from monarchs to watermen cross paths in a narrative tied together by Purcell’s music and Balsom’s resplendent natural trumpet-playing.

‘Speech, song and score flow together in one teeming whole that sweeps you along with it’ wrote Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph in 2013, when Gabriel was first performed at Shakespeare’s Globe. With director Dominic Dromgoole and The English Concert, Balsom has reimagined it for the Barbican as part of her Milton Court artist residency – a fresh encounter with a theatrical experience that (in Cavendish’s words) ‘leaves you giddy with pleasure and fully smitten’.