Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
A lovely Sunday evening concert at The Wigmore Hall.
Handel was the focus but it included works by some lesser-known characters from that late Baroque period: Agostino Steffani, Francesco Venturini and Nicola Haym.
No, me neither, hence links provided.
The concert was part of that year’s London Handel Festival. I have saved the brochure from the web – here.
Anyway, the music was lovely and as always we found an evening of music at The Wig a most relaxing way to round off a weekend.
Say what you like about Daisy, but she does like a nice bit of castrati.
So we made a second visit to the Wigmore Hall that month (a busy start there in 2009 generally in fact) to see this lovely concert, with Daniel Taylor providing the counter-tenor equivalent of castrati singing and Rachel Brown providing beautiful flute and recorder performances.
Here’s what we saw:
The weekend after Easter, we visited the London Handel Festival for this tasty Baroque concert by the (then) fairly new Southbank Sinfonia.
We heard:
Janie couldn’t complain that it was cold this time – we were having a bit of an April heatwave in London. But still she felt that St George’s was austere as a venue…
…”it’s bum-aching, like sitting in Church”…
…”it IS a Church”…
…so she reiterated her strong preference for the Wigmore Hall.
We both agreed that the music was lovely, though.
Below is a delightful later performance by the very same orchestra (under Julian Perkins) of the Giustino:
Below is a beautiful video of the Rameau In Convertendo with William Christie conducting but no identification of the orchestra ( Les Arts Florissants presumably) nor the wonderful soloists – perhaps some of the Early Music Group aficionados can help with the identification of those:
If you click through this link instead, you can then also hear the other parts in YouTube.
I have the whole festival programme, but here is the one-pager with most of the relevant information about that particular, excellent gig.
