After Dark Concert

Saint Roch Chapel invites you to attend Pierre Gallon’s harpsichord concert, *After Dark*, *“A Nocturnal Fantasy”*, on 10 April at 6.30 pm. *After Dark*: darkness falls, the curtain rises. London, 1600. Like an evening’s performance at the theatre where, as night falls, the stage becomes a place of infinite possibilities, this programme opens up a sonic space in which the English night reveals itself in myriad facets. A programme that invites us to project our own reveries and contemporary imagination onto this unique moment of the day, but also, more broadly, onto a vibrant era whose zeitgeist already permitted every form of creative daring. As the pieces are performed on various keyboard instruments, the many faces of this imagined night unfold: from delicate dreams echoing fleeting encounters, to spiritual flights of fancy – a typically English musical genre where imagination is the only law. From this chimera, at times tinged with a sense of uncanny strangeness, a subtle tension emerges, a utopia that echoes Shakespeare’s words in the delightful oxymoron of his Sonnet 43: ‘And darkly bright are bright in dark directed’ – ‘And with a disturbing clarity, those guided through the night shine’.