Baroque
Boyd Tonkin
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of phrase and line makes this music feel as natural and necessary as breathing, sang Handel’s nine German-language arias to pious texts by Bartold Heinrich Brockes (who also wrote the words to the “Brockes Passion”). In between clusters of songs, the Arcangelo players – violinist Matthew Truscott, lutenist Thomas Dunford and cellist Jonathan Manson, with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a year of absences and separations, here was another one we had to bear. Built around a programme of Baroque double concertos, last night’s Prom should have brought Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova together in a violin super-duo that promised marvels. In the event, a family bereavement kept Ibragimova away from the audience-free Royal Albert Hall. Yet, and again in the phoenix-from-the-ashes spirit of the arts in 2020, the improvised solution proved an uplifting delight. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which backed the soloists, has always sounded like a band of stars. Its Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and curator is also a bit obsessed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially as played by the maverick Canadian genius Glenn Gould. Well, Luis – snap. The last pre-lockdown Goldbergs I heard live fizzed into the Devon twilight a year ago during the Dartington Festival, in a blistering, furiously-paced performance by pianist Joanna MacGregor that Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Nymphs and shepherds – go away? In music, as in art or literature, the pastoral fripperies of the Baroque age can feel utterly alien to modern tastes. Those dalliances, seductions and abductions in the Arcadian landscapes of myth may cease to entice in an era that takes sexual violence seriously, while we scorn play-acting toffs who ape the lifestyle of some idealised peasantry, Marie Antoinette-style. That said, never forget that one particular self-conscious exercise in Baroque pastoral – the violin concerti of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – remains the world’s best-known piece of classical music Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It doesn’t matter where you stand, whether you crouch, or teeter on tiptoe: looking into the eyes of Bernini’s Medusa, 1638-40, is impossible. The attempt is peculiarly exhilarating, a game of dare made simultaneously tantalising and absurd by the sculpture’s evident stoniness. This extraordinary work – all the more remarkable for being relatively little known – is no less than frank in its materiality, its buttery striations delicious to look at and almost irresistably tactile, its muscular mass of snakes a dangerous and beguiling invitation to touch.The Medusa’s face is no less equivocal in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“How many times have you heard the conductor sing?” asked William Christie after the final number, but before the two encores, of Sunday night’s 40th birthday celebration for his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Well, lovers of old recordings know that you sometimes get plenty of impromptu vocalisation from the likes of Bernstein and Barbirolli. But what the august founder of the Baroque super-group (and super-chorus) meant on this occasion was the bravura performance of his co-conductor, and assistant director, Paul Agnew. In several of the pieces he led at the Barbican, Agnew would turn round Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One of the more harmless pastimes of us retired academics is rummaging around among the so-called minor contemporaries of great and famous composers. It often turns out that quite a few of them aren’t minor at all, or at least not minor enough to have to have retired academics dig them out. And two such composers made up nearly the whole of this fascinating opening concert of the annual Brecon Baroque Festival, an event well worth battling through floods, high winds and falling trees to be present at, as was necessary on this occasion.The 2019 festival is all about Bohemia, and the stars of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Blame it on the box set. The four Bach Orchestral Suites fit neatly together as a recording project. They used to fill out the four sides of a double LP back in the early stages of the baroque revival. Completists and collectors could rejoice then, and with many more versions to choose from, they still can now. But are these pieces, which were never intended to be played one after the other, varied enough to make a satisfying and convincing concert? Not really.The first problem is a nagging propensity to hang around in D major. Two of the four suites – so half of the set in the versions Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final, and only UK, date of his Vinci Arias tour, virtuoso countertenor Franco Fagioli gave an animated and arresting recital of baroque arias at Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday afternoon with the Italian period instrument group Il pomo d’oro. The programme’s premise was to shine a light not only on the music of one of today’s best-known baroque composers - Handel - but also some of his contemporaries, examining how the composers’ relationships and rivalries with one another inspired and affected each their writing. Directed from the violin by concertmaster Zefira Valova, Il Pomo Read more ...
David Nice
It might be the nature of Handel's operatic beasts, but performances tend to fall into two camps: brilliant in the fusion of drama and virtuosity, singing and playing, or boring to various degrees. If this handsome opening gambit in the 2019 London Handel Festival is a mixture of both, that may be due more to the fact that Berenice is one of the composer's more generic offerings, not in the league of Ariodante or Alcina which also premiered on the Covent Garden site two years earlier (in 1735). Young director Adele Thomas draws a winning and precise physicality from a fine cast, but like so Read more ...
Samir Savant
This is my third year as festival director of the London Handel Festival, an annual celebration of the life and work of composer George Frideric Handel, which takes place every spring in venues across the capital. Our core charitable and artistic objectives for the Festival are to explore the full repertoire of Handel, to bring the composer’s music to broader audiences and to continue his tradition of nurturing young talent. I have always known Handel’s music, having sung it since I was a boy, but it is only in recent years that I have come to discover the complex and loveable character Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It’s Christmas already at Wigmore Hall. Or advent at least – this concert of Bach Advent cantatas was presented by the English Concert without apology or qualification, despite it still being the middle of November. But it proved a welcome fillip for a wet and dreary November evening, with the energetic and engaged playing of the small ensemble bringing out all the life and playfulness in Bach’s scores.Balance was a problem though, with the players often overpowering the singers (no choir here, the chorales and choruses all sung one to a part). The orchestra was bigger, with two desks each of Read more ...