Janie and I had encouraged the Wigmore Hall to bring in more jazz, so we felt almost duty bound to attend the first gig by a new curator of a jazz season, Brad Mehldau.
Even on an awkward Thursday evening.
Highly acclaimed, is Brad, and highly accomplished too.
This concert was Brad solo playing the piano – not as much to our taste as small ensembles. Perhaps not totally our style of jazz either, although we left the Wigmore Hall very much looking forward to seeing Brad and the rest of his trio in the autumn.
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.
Was this the first time we saw Mahan Esfahani? Probably. This concert is listed on Esfahani’s Wikipedia entry (at the time of writing) as his first major concert.
Was this the first time we heard a composition by J G Goldberg (he of Goldberg variations fame)? For sure.
A delightful concert as always by this low key but consistently masterful lot.
Rather a different feel, this one, as the conceit of the concert was to mix early music with some contemporary compositions influenced by those earlier periods.
Central to the concert was Purcell, whose 350th birthday was that year and who therefore featured a lot in 2009 concert programmes.
Here is the full listing for this 1 February gig:
In truth, Janie and I got a lot more out of the early music than the contemporary stuff, although I always enjoy Arvo Pärt more than I expect and the Shostakovich was interesting too.
But Purcell was the star of the show, as was Clare Wilkinson, who specialises in singing this Renaissance and Baroque stuff; often with Fretwork.
We have been enthusiasts of Jazz at the Wigmore Hall ever since we saw the Tord Gustavsen Trio at “The Wig” as part of the London Jazz Festival a few years earlier.
This Kenny Warner and Martin Speake concert was very good, although (to our taste) not quite as suited to the Wigmore Hall as the smaller, tighter sound of ensembles such as Tord Gustvsen’s.
It does thrill us to witness, so often, performers clearly in awe of the venue and so delighted to be able to play there. It makes us realise how lucky we are to live so close to the place, to be friends of it and to attend so regularly. As I write this note (10 April 2017) I am looking forward to a visit to the Wig this very evening…but for early music, not jazz this time.
Returning to the Kenny Warner and Martin Speake – we actually got the latter in the first half and the former in the second half.
We enjoyed both – I got more out of the Kenny Warner which had a Dixieland sound to it which pleases me more than it pleases Janie.
Still, a lovely way to spend a Sunday evening, especially when you have booked the day off work Monday.
Janie really likes the Glenn Miller sound and was less familiar with the Benny Goodman sound. We’d also been checking out the Cadogan Hall at that time, so this seemed like an interesting concert to try, albeit a Sunday evening with busy day’s the next day both.
We’d had quite a busy day on the Sunday too, as Tony and Phillie visited for lunch that day, presumably after a refreshment-free visit to “Grandma” in the morning, while Janie and I played tennis.
This type of replication concert isn’t really our thing. Cadogan Hall is the right size of hall for it, though. Be both like clarinet and Pete Long is for sure a good enough musician, as are the rest of his “Goodmen”.
We enjoyed the gig.
I couldn’t find much on this concert on-line, except that Cadogan Hall clearly has repeated the dose occasionally and the following resource was still (perhaps only temporarily) up at the time of writing (March 2017), from 2014, so I have scraped it:
The story of Jewish composers and musicians in the Tudor period is a fascinating one. In theory they were banned from England at that time. In practice, blind eyes were turned when the Tudor court wanted some of the best musicians in Europe to pop in.
In truth, the music was not, to our ears, the most pleasing Tudor period viol music we’d heard. Fretwork are and as always were top notch on this evening, but the modern Orlando Gough work inspired by the story and indeed some of the material, especially the songs, were not so much to our taste.
Still, it was beautiful and interesting and we were very glad we’d booked this concert.
Janie and I had booked the next day (Monday) off. My diary suggests that we simply used that day to sort out stuff and do our own thing. But whatever the plan, we do enjoy a Sunday evening concert that much more when we know we don’t have to work the next day.
Writing this Ogblog piece made me realise that I don’t have any Fretwork in my collection at all. I put that right, but not with Birds On Fire…
Janie likes a bit of sax. So a quartet of saxophonists playing Italian Baroque at the Wigmore hall seemed right up our street.
At the time of writing, I have had a more recent sax quartet experience – click here – having retained only a vague memory of having seen a sax quartet before. This Copenhagen Saxophone Quartet experience was it.
Judging from their website activities page – click here – this appearance at the Wigmore Hall might have been the end of the story for this troupe, even if at the time of booking it might have seemed like a big break near their beginning.
The concert does have an instant encore listing, though, which I am delighted to link here, although (at the time of writing) I am the only person to confess to having been at the concert. I think there were quite a few of us in, but perhaps not the packed Saturday night the Wig and the quartet might have hoped for.
Which is all a shame, as they were rather good, as was their interesting choice of music. I remember them describing their instruments and the pieces they were playing rather well.
I seem to recall that the baroque pieces did more for us than the modern ones. I also recall feeling that saxophone might not be the ideal instrument for baroque music – all sentiments that returned to me when I saw the Ferio Quartet at SJSS in December 2016 – click here.
