Blow : Venus and Adonis. O’Dette, Stubbs.

   in Early Music Today (Dec, 2011)
It is 60 years ago in September 1951 that Anthony Lewis made the first recording of Blow’s through-sung entertainment, Venus and Adonis. It was a major event in the early days of vinyl, and the great French painter, Marie Laurencin, was specially commissioned to provide a watercolour for the sleeve. Masque, opera, call it what you will, Venus and Adonis (c.1682) is a work of beguiling, intimate and ingenuous charm. Th e libretto, by an unidentified hand is, in part at least, a satire on court life, but essentially it is a pastoral and one with a profoundly affecting third act where Venus mourns the death of her lover, Adonis. While …