We sat directly behind Andrew McGregor, who presented the concert for BBC Radio 3 listeners. It is the first time we have ever sat in those seats, which was enlightening and slightly distracting in equal measure. We did at least, from there, hear what the presenter is telling the Radio 3 audience, which is often a bit more than can be found on the programme.
Actually, for this concert, most of what we wanted was in the programme, which can be found through the Wigmore Hall link or, if that ever fails, here.
If you are finding this within a month or so of the concert, then you can hear it on BBC Sounds – click here.
In the concert hall we got a sweet encore by Pietro Locatelli, which made me realise that I had paid that composer far too little attention, so we listened to a fair smattering of Locatelli when we got home. We also discussed his football skills and his magnificence as a restaurateur.
In the first half, Michele Rabbia, Gianluca Petrella and Eivind Aarset played their unusual style of electronically-enhanced ambient music, mostly pieces from the album Lost River.
Here’s an example piece – Nimbus
One lady in our row, clearly not keen on electronically enhanced jazz, decided not to stick around for the second half. That’s a shame, because it was very different and not electronically enhanced at all.
Avishai Cohen and Yonathan Avishai have been friends since they were kids and the camaraderie really showed. Their set mostly came form the album “Playing The Room”.
Here’s a sample from that:
Here is a live video of them playing a lullaby, which i think they used as their encore:
Not a concert to set your pulse racing, but two very interesting acts and a good way to start concert-going in 2024.
We also heard and saw a beautiful cetterone, an instrument about which I needed to do research afterwards. Likewise the lirone, (see below).
But the thing that made this concert so very special was the extraordinary piece we heard. Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo.
Vox Luminis are a wonderful outfit who don’t tend to disappoint. This evening was no exception. They perform with smiles on their faces and clearly celebrate each other’s and their joint success.
Here is a trailer of Vox Luminis performing this very piece in 2021 in Utrecht. Different soloists, but you can’t have everything:
Janie and I are not easily wowed these days – we’ve seen a lot of excellent concerts in our time, but this one blew our metaphorical socks off. Delicious music, sounding a little different from anything we’ve heard before from that period. Sweeter than Monteverdi oratorios, but loads going on in the soundscape.
Janie and I had enjoyed a lunchtime concert of the latter composer’s work only a year or so ago, at the hands of Nevermind – click here or below:
Strozzi and Caccini provided the songs – I suppose I should call them madrigals from that era. They were all operatic in style, which suits Roberta Invernizzi’s theatrical delivery and powerful soprano voice.
Invernizzi was ably supported by period instrumentalists, all extremely capable on their instruments. Two theorboes and a harp seems almost an embarrassment of plucked-string-riches, but the sound was lovely so we wallowed in the excess.
In truth, to our taste, the trio sonatas and passacaille of Leonarda and Jacquet De La Guerre respectively were more to our taste than the madrigals, but we enjoyed the whole concert.
Here is an example of a Leonarda sonata – coincidentally from an album primarily containing Roberta Invernizzi but not on this instrumental piece:
Below, from a separate recording, is Roberta Invernizzi singing Strozzi’s Sino Alla Morte, one of the madrigals we heard:
Almost everything that I want to say in words about this event is contained in the “match report” on King Cricket – click here or below, where, in case you didn’t know, dear reader, I am Ged and Janie is Daisy:
If anything were ever to go awry with the King Cricket site, click this link for a scrape of that report.
Janie took a ludicrous number of pictures – you can see them all through the Flickr link below:
Janie and I were very motivated by the live appearance of Rudimental and mugged up on their hits in advance of the concert…I mean Finals Day.
I expected that we might see live performances of at least four Rudimental bangers and we were treated to all four of the ones I expected we’d see:
I was also hoping for this next one, which I especially liked when mugging up, but they didn’t do this one. Shoulda been a bigger hit in my opinion, but my opinion didn’t guarantee hits even when I was younger, let alone now!
You find out who your friends are when you go to this sort of concert…
…or more realistically, The Wigmore Hall management finds out who its friends are.
Frankly, I booked this concert because I fancied hearing the Liszt transcription of Beethoven Seven, which, in the end, Igor Levit decided not to perform. Never mind. This is the concert programme he chose instead.
Anyway, the “Friends Party” aspect was secondary in my mind.
Janie and I didn’t know that the Friends of Wigmore Hall had been going for 30 years. We are mere arrivistes at the place, starting our adventures there a mere 25 years ago, in 1998, with this concert:
..for which we befriended the place and then attended pretty regularly (several times a year, pandemic aside) ever since.
After saying some fine words about how important the Friends of Wigmore Hall is to the hall and how important the hall is to his artistic life, Igor Levit played Schumann and Brahms instead of the Liszt.
After the concert, maintaining the Brahms and Liszt theme (did you see what I did there?) a drinks reception with Champagne for those who like alcoholic fizz and sparking elderflower presse for those who, like me, prefer their fizz non-alcoholic during the day.
On departure, Janie and I decided to thank John Gilhooly, who has been running the place extremely well for years, for the party.
Janie and I confessed to not having been supporters for all 30 years. John told us that we didn’t look like those who had been supporting for 30 years. Perhaps he underestimated our ages and wouldn’t have guessed that we have supported for 25 of the 30.
We then chatted briefly about John’s campaign to try to introduce a younger audience to the Hall, which Janie and I applaud. John then made a slightly off-colour remark about the reception being a bit of a legacies marketing campaign event…”but not directed at you two, obviously”, he said.
So I suppose we’d better remove The Wigmore Hall from our bequests list, then. 😉
The theme of this rather wonderful BBC Lunchtime Concert at Wigmore Hall was imitations. All of the pieces had themes within them in which the music imitates some sort of natural sound.
Janie and I thought this was an excellent and very interesting concert. We very nearly missed it, as I, in an extremely rare omission, forgot to write this Wigmore Hall date in our diaries when I booked this back in February. It was only because there was a small change to the programme that I was alerted to my omission and fortunately we wee both able still to make the date.
The headline picture is sort-of an imitation too – that painting by Jan Voorhout was once thought to be Dieterich Buxtehude, the composer of the first piece we heard, but is now believed simply to be a domestic music scene of that baroque period.
If you just fancy one little listen to some Baroque imitation, then the third movement of this sonata by Johann Paul von Westhoff, which we heard, should thrill your ears.
Continuing the theme of imitation, I suppose I spent the day “imitating” a young man. I have said in recent years that there are now only three places left where people sometimes call me “young man” without irony: Wigmore Hall, Lord’s and Gresham Society. Today I enjoyed all three.
After Wigmore Hall, I went on to lord’s for a cracking game of real tennis doubles.
Then on to the National Liberal Club for the Gresham Society AGM and dinner. For reasons known only to him (and in a style only Tim could muster), Professor Connell invited me to sit at the top table:
Would you care to join us on the top table tomorrow night?
Everyone else has refused and it will look a bit odd if there is no-one on it.
It would have been hard to refuse such a courteous request.
Tim Connell promised to keep the formal AGM bit to seven minutes but those around me suggested that he strayed into the 10-15 minutes zone, as usual.
Worse yet, despite spending the day in all three places where I am still occasionally addressed as “young man”, no-one had done so that day and no-one did so that evening.
Still, I chatted with lots of interesting people and enjoyed a good dinner.
The concert included an excerpt from a Bach Partita, folk music from Bengal & Assam and then a couple of Amjad Ali Khan’s ragas, both of which arranged beautifully for violin and sarod.
To give you a feel for Jennifer Pike’s wonderful interpretation of a Bach Partita, here is an excerpt from her performing a different Partita:
To give you a feel for the brothers Amaan & Ayaan Ali Bangash playing together, here is a duet recorded a few years ago. No Jennifer Pike of course and a different tabla player – we saw Anubrata Chatterjee.
The music was beautiful, but I must admit that we struggled a little to understand the ancient and modern connections as explained. For example, the notion that the sarod pieces were basically in the Lydian mode, although I think that term could only apply perhaps to the tuning of the strings, not how the music is composed or played. We could however hear wonderful relationships between the instruments and the notion (explained in the notes) that underlying melodies in the ragas are utilised in similar fashion to cantus firmus styles in late medieval, Renaissance and even Baroque music made sense.
Anyway, it was all beautiful music, deployed in virtuoso fashion, leaving us thrilled with our night out at The Wig, as is so often the case.
Gresham Professors Singing The Gresham Professors’ Song, With Thanks To Basil Bezuidenhout for the pictures and the “live music” video
Was it really three years ago that we last enjoyed one of these soirées? Yup. Last year’s event had to be postponed at the last minute.
The only good news about that delay was that the Gresham music professor, Jeremy Summerly, who was unavailable to attend in person last year, was available this year. Splendid news in particular because his deep knowledge about and insights into early music were especially welcome in the matter of the piece that I had “uncovered in autograph manuscript form”, just before the pandemic.
Fortunately for all concerned, we had professional musicians to entertain us for the first half of the show, before we Greshamistas got the opportunity to ruin everything.
Actually, before the professionals got the chance to entertain us, the noisiest amateur of us all, Michael Mainelli, piped us in to Barnard’s Inn Hall in the now traditional style.
Someone once asked me if I ever duet with Michael. My reply:
What would be the point? You’d only hear Michael.
Mercifully for all our ears, the professional team of David Jones and Sofia Kirwan-Baez soon established a pleasant tone to proceedings, both treating us to their fine keyboard skills as well as their excellent voices, with Part 1 of the show.
Sofia has a fine operatic voice, which really came to the fore when she sang the Massenet and the Puccini. David always entertains, not least with his “party piece”, Lehrer’s Elements Song, in which he subtly switches from “Harvard” to “Barnard’s” for the punchline. Also a lovely rendition of Misty, although I can never hear that song any more without thinking of the Gresham Society visit to the London Mithraeum and my resulting Mithras version of that song:
Part 2 of the programme was a different affair, of course, with some regular and irregular antics.
As for my little offering, Þe Fair Weather Canticle, it had been long in the process between “rediscovering” and performing.
I supplied Professor Jeremy Summerly with a copy of the “autograph” and a demo recording, the latter you can see below:
Professor Summerly very kindly gave this opus more than its fair share of scholarly attention, helping the audience to understand the historical significance of my “discovery” with a professorial dissertation on the piece. Unfortunately, that mini-lecture, a masterpiece in its own right, was not recorded for posterity on the night, but I do have some of Jeremy’s notes, which I can share with readers:
Of necessity, discoveries of new sources in the field of early music are less and less frequent as time goes on. All musicologists dream of finding a source of forgotten music, even more so a fragment that might fill in significant holes in our understanding of music history.
Yet such a discovery has been made recently. It is hardly surprising that such a fragment might turn up on the site of a medieval coaching inn, and even less surprising that this inn should be located in Middle England.
The musico-poetic gem þe Fair Weather Canticle, like much early music, surprises us through its apparent modernity. Like the brightly-coloured decoration of a medieval ceiling, or the dissonant harmonies and boldly-contrasting texts of a medieval motet, there is something shockingly modern about this ancient canticle.
Scholars will need time to consider the implications of this newly-found piece within the pre-Baroque jigsaw.
Meanwhile, the words and music should be enjoyed for what they represent: a perplexingly polystylistic mesh of jumbled ideologies and opaque thinking.
Professor Summerly then went on to examine the words of the canticle, noticing some astounding…in some cases shocking…similarities between those words and the words of subsequently well-known songs from periods ranging from the 12th to 17th centuries. In one case, even the 20th.
Finally, Professor Summerly, being an expert on early music, provided some historical context to my performance on an original instrument, which he kindly described as:
a rare and fascinating example of a gittern-ulele, an instrument probably of similar vintage to the canticle.
The instrument has an exceptionally sweet sound in the hands of an appropriate musician…or so we are led to believe, if only such a virtuoso performer could be found.
In the right hands, this gittern-ulele would quite possibly be, to the guitar-family, what Paganini’s Il Cannone Guarnerius is to the violin.
As for the gittern-ulele performance you are about to hear, many of you will surely be moved to tears when listening to the sound of this extraordinary old git?”
It was hard for me to follow that introduction, but I tried, after a subdued start. Basil recorded the moment for posterity – for which I am grateful. It is not every day that my work is professorially conducted, but the triumphant chorus at the end benefitted greatly from Professor Summerly’s expertise, as I had my hands full at the time:
For those who would like to study the words or are crazy enough to try singing along with the vids, here are the words:
Sumer is icumen in, þe nymphs and shepherds dance Bryd one brere, groweth sed and bloweth med And don’t you know, amarylis dance in green–ee-ee-een.
Lightly whipping o’er þe dales, with wreaths of rose and laurel, Fair nymphs tipping, with fauns and satyrs tripping Mister Blue Sky is living here today hey, hey hey.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Hey you with þe angels face, bright, arise, awake, awake! About her charret, with all admiring strains as today, all creatures now are merry… (…merry merry merry, merry merry merry merry, merry merry, merry, merry merry merry merry merry merry minded.)
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Hey there mister blue, who likes to love, lhude sing cuccu, Nauer nu, ne swik thu, sing hey nonny nonny nu.
Mirie it is while sumer ilast, in darkness let me fast, Flow my tears, fairwell all joys for years, Never mind, I joy not in early, I joy not in early bliss.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light. Ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba, ba x2
After the show, there was plenty of time for eating, drinking, chatting and making merry, as is the case at any good soirée. The Gresham Society Soirée is certainly always a good one.