"An Evening at the Theatre" reconstructs the musical part of a masque as it might have been performed in a London theatre around 1680. As courtly entertainment, the masque combined instrumental music, dance, theatre, song and pantomime and flourished in England from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. English art music, John Playford’s country dances and Scottish folk music had their place in the same musical event. In the middle of the programme, The Theater of Music gives prominence to the oddity known as the "anti-masque", a genuine comic interlude within the masque itself. Its aim was to cheer up or even parody the king or some other person of high rank through scenic and instrumental antics, before returning to a more polite level of discourse, thus emphasising the subservience of subjects to their ruler. © Ramée