In an unprecedented musical and theatrical event, Alison Balsom, one of the world’s finest trumpeters, and award-winning writer Samuel Adamson explore the notion that the natural (valveless) trumpet was the supreme musical instrument of the Restoration. With music by Purcell and Handel, the text brings to the stage real and imagined characters including Mary II and Queen Anne as well as the trumpet-makers, musicians, composers, patrons and audiences of the teeming musical scene in late seventeenth century London.

Intersecting plays, instrumentals, songs and poems will bring to life this glorious pageant of the Baroque period, the time when the trumpet began to ‘sing’, and express in its uniquely celebratory fashion the turning points in human experience: birth, war, love and death.