You don’t have to be a Telemaniac (nor a Beliber) to have enjoyed this concert …but it helps.
We absolutely loved it, but then we are lovers of Baroque music by the likes of Telemann and Biber.
Further, we were treated to some early Baroque by Schein and Simpson, to whet our appetites and to show us how table music emerged as a genre in the 17th century.
Below is a short vid that shows the AAM under Richard Egarr rehearsing a Telemann concerto – one of my favourites as it happens:
Below is a nice selection of Telemann Tafelmusik – but not by AAM:
Finally, for those unfamiliar with Thomas Simpson (as we were) who would like to hear a small sample – below a little woodwind sampler, provenance unknown beyond the YouTube details provided:
But actually I was brought up with some early Baroque madrigals ringing in my ears – a reel-to-reel recording, made by my father, from the radio, of Monteverdi’s Madrigals of Love and War.
The extraordinary BBC genome Project allows me to find the concert in question so easily it is almost embarrassingly easy – it was broadcast on 4 June 1974 at 21:50 – click here. I wouldn’t have heard the recording on that day – clearly, but dad probably played it to me pretty soon afterwards and I remember listening to it a lot that summer. The concert had originally taken place in October 1973 – a few weeks after I started secondary school.
But I digress…
…except to say that I had never heard any Madrigals of Love and War live and was keen to hear some – hence my particular desire to book this concert.
Thursday evening is not (and in those days certainly was not) Janie’s favourite night to go to a concert. Nor is Monteverdi one of her favourites.
This concert conformed Janie’s view that Monteverdi is not really for her. All too noisy and the male singing is a bit shouty, she claims. I sort-of know what she means, without agreeing with the conclusion.
Janie did enjoy some of the instrumental music, though…
…here is a vid of some other folk playing the opening number we heard that evening – Falconieri’s lovely Ciaconna in G major:
Is that William Carter on the theorbo or a Naxi Musician in Lijiang on the pipa?
I was most amused, when I tracked down the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM’s) blog piece about the concert we attended on 24 September 2010 – click here for the whole piece – to read this snippet:
The mood’s lively tonight. William Carter (theorbo) comes in to the dressing room in the interval telling us that a punter has accosted him and enquired whether his instrument is Chinese. “No”, replies Bill. “It looks very much like an instrument I saw in China”, insists the punter mysteriously.
I can now solve the mystery – Janie (Daisy) is the mystery punter.
We had been to China a few months earlier and had seen a concert of ancient Chinese music performed by Naxi musicians in Lijiang, Yunnan province – pictures 97 to 107 on the following album:
I remember Janie asking me whether that big lute thing…
…was the same as the Chinese instrument we saw in Lijiang.
“No”, I said.
“That’s what he said”, she said, confessing that she had asked William Carter that question as we were leaving the hall for the interval.
I explained that there was a fair bit of cross-fertilisation of musical instruments between east and west in the Renaissance period, but that instrument is a close relative of the lute and that family of instruments is more of a middle-east to west cross-fertilisation than a far-east to west influence. I also explained that the Chinese instruments of that kind might be far more ancient than any in the west, so technically, there might be a dim and distant connection.
“So, basically yes, then?” suggested Janie.
“Basically no,” I dared to disagree.
It is most amusing to find, so many years later (writing in December 2017) Janie’s exchange with William Carter preserved on the AAM blog.
We have since seen pipa concerts and I think Janie could now distinguish theorbo-type and pipa-type instruments with some skill.
I have one other anecdote about William Carter, from a few months later. By that time, my mum was in Nightingale House, her dementia worsening. I was at that time often visiting her and then jumping on the tube to go to the city.
Walking along Nightingale Lane towards Clapham South, I saw a young man just ahead of me carrying a large musical instrument case that looked to me as though it could only contain a theorbo.
I hurried my step, caught up with the young man and said, “excuse me, but is that instrument of yours a theorbo?” He beamed a smile at me and said, “yes it is. I have been lugging this theorbo around London for years now and have had the daftest questions asked about it…you are the first person who has actually recognised it and enquired after it by name!”
It turned out that the young man was one of William Carter’s students at Guildhall and was on the way to see him. We had a most pleasant chat about early music on the tube into the city together.
A very interesting concert, this. We had heard a fair amount of music by JS Bach’s many composer/descendents, but I don’t think we’d heard any music by his forebears before.
In truth, this isn’t the most wonderful music we have ever heard; it is of its (mostly early to mid) baroque period. Unexceptional, other than the fact that it must have been an influence on JS Bach and all that followed.
But the AAM folk did their best to keep the concert lively and engaging. Richard Egarr is an engaging master of ceremonies, Pavlo Beznosiuk always looks as though he is about to wink at the audience and even William Carter smiled a bit during the riper anecdotes of introduction.
The conceit of this tasty concert was to play baroque music that has been used in movies in the last 25 years.
It would have made little difference to us had we remained ignorant of the movie link, but possibly the conceit helped to pull in an audience, not that the Academy of Ancient Music needs much help at the Wigmore Hall on a Friday evening. Perhaps it helped the night before in Cambridge.
Richard Egarr has a very pleasant manner, as do the named soloists for this gig.
This is what we heard:
Just what the doctor ordered after a hard week’s work. Or under any circumstances really.
I’m not sure why we feel this way, but we sense something a little cliquey and clinical about the Academy of Ancient Music – perhaps it is the corporate-style branding.
The music of course is beautiful. Not quite sure why I chose this particular serving of fairly standard baroque concert fare, especially on an inconvenient Wednesday night for Janie. I think I might have been itching to hear the BWV1042 violin concerto live and wondering about Locatelli.
