Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
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.
We enjoyed it all well enough.
This geezer could play.
Janie was on one of her classical guitar kicks at that time (pretty much perennial, they are, but she was especially on one of those that year), so we booked this Purcell Room concert, even for a Friday night.
It was very much part of a cultural programme through the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Society (LACCS) and the Chilean Embassy, so the great and the good from the Chilean community were out in force.
Friday evening after work, but the stresses of the week soon faded away as we listened to this wonderful music.
Did I mention that this geezer could play? Well, you can decide for yourself, as the LACCS maintains an amazing archive – so you can hear some clips on this link…
…or if you would simply like to look at the programme and the programme notes, the LACCS has spared me the trouble of amateurish scanning by providing the programme here. Jolly decent of them, as my dad would have put it.
We were supposed to see someone else. Was it Paco Pena? Juan Martin? Yet another well-known guitarist?
Anyway, we weren’t supposed to see Tom Kerstens.
Had we known his relative quality, we’d have accepted the offer of our money back rather than persevered with a Sunday evening concert substitute. But we thought, heck, give the fellow a try. Oh dear.
Still, we’d had a corker of a month in the theatre and music department until this point. Here’s the programme (yes, really) – let’s draw a veil.
Wow, we loved this concert.
The last of our visits to the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music that year, this one really inspired us. It comprises religious baroque music from the places people would visit on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella.
The lovely Arianna Savall sang and played the renaissance harp. She is the daughter of Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras.
So insired by this concert were we, that we made our own “pilgrimage to Santiago” the following spring, after visiting nephew Paul in Barcelona – click here for our pictures of Santiago.
Disappointing though, was the fact that we were unable to buy a recording of the music we heard. All that was available for purchase on the night was mum and dad’s “Homenatge Al Misteri D’Elx – La Vespra” – interesting music but not the beautiful stuff we heard that night.
Surprised and delighted was I, therefore, to discover just now, while researching this blog piece, Ensemble La Fenice/Arianna Savall released a recording of the very stuff we heard that night, a mere four years after our concert. I immediately purchased and downloaded the album and am listening to it as I write. It really is lovely music.
Just two days after our last visit to the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music, we’re back to see another. Janie is a sucker for a countertenor and we are both suckers for visiting European baroque troupes we haven’t heard before.
Typically of SJSS and its artistes, the fabulously-named Fabio Bonizzoni can only sell us recordings of the Scarlatti stuff we heard performed by other people a couple of days ago.
Still, I buy that CD and some other La Risonanza stuff. We were neither disappointed by the concert nor by the CDs.
Fabio and La Risonanza rock. Guest singers Roberta Invernizzi, Emanuela Galli, Xavier Sabata also rock.
Well, they don’t rock, let’s be honest, they are baroque musicians, none of them rock. But this was a really enjoyable concert.
Here’s the stuff they played us that night:
The Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music was a regular “must visit” for us for several years. Sadly, the sponsorship ended (I think 2014 was the last year) so the festival is now a shadow of its former self.
On this evening, Janie and I attended both concerts; Carole Cerasi on the Harpsichord early evening and then London Baroque later. Domingo Scarlatti was the theme (how did you guess?).
Both excellent gigs, well worth the long evening at SJSS. The relevant extracts from the programme so you can see exactly what we heard are shown below.
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.
At the end of a stressy week, what could be better than an evening of jazz at Thw Wigmore Hall?
And what a stressy week it had been – with the deal to sell most of the business to Aon/McLagan Partners due to complete that week but actually not completed until the following week.
In truth, I don’t remember all that much about this concert other than the joy of sitting and letting a very accomplished jazz trio weave their magic for me.
I couldn’t find a vid of exactly the three who played our night, but two out of three ain’t bad:
While below is a subsequent extract from Portrait Of A Woman including vocals:
I had recently acquired my first iPod – a gift from Kim and Micky, so this was my first party playlist and by gosh I did it the hard way.
Had to do it the hard way, really, as my music collection was all CDs and vinyl, so I ripped (in the case of CDs) or specifically digitised through a sound box/Audacity (in the case of vinyl) every single track I wanted for this party.
Not quite as onerous as the old cassette and reel-to-reel compilation tapes, but hardly the “quick search and click” ability I now have, as my whole collection is digitised and in the cloud on iTunes (other cloud music services are available.
Here’s the CD Box Style thing that iTunes does for you, but it only shows the first 22 tracks…
Daisy Partial Party Playlist CD Box Stylee with image
…there are actually 114 tracks on this playlist; over 8 hours of music. Here’s the full list:
Daisy Whole Party 2006 Playlist
I made the first hour or more solidly Arabian style to go with the theme of the party – click here for a link to the story of the party and more besides. Then a more conventional party playlist, with the mandatory Barry White for Phillie and plenty of dance music for Janie.
There’s some seriously good stuff on there, though I say so myself. Janie and I still listen to that list reasonably often, even though I have better digital recordings of many of those tracks now.
This memory was triggered by this charming piece on the King Cricket website in late May 2020:
Janie (Daisy) and I weren’t there for the tense ending of that match either. But we were nearby – there in spirit if not in body.
We had been eagerly following the match all day.
But that day was also the birthday of Daisy’s mother, The Duchess of Castlebar. I had bought tickets for the three of us to see a Bach concert at the Wigmore Hall for that evening.
Janie had quite recently acquired a taste for chamber concert halls and baroque music, perhaps a year or two earlier. The Duchess tended to prefer large scale concerts of the Proms variety; we mostly booked those for her. But the Proms don’t get going until a bit later in the summer and it was the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death that year. So Bach at The Wig it was to be.
Anyway, that afternoon the Lord’s Test Match was beautifully poised and/but for reasons I cannot recall – had there been a lot of overnight rain? – the day’s play had been delayed and was playing out until quite late.
The Duchess is an avid follower of the cricket as well as a music aficionado. We called her to let her know that we were on the way to collect her. We could all listen to the ending of the cricket match together on the car radio on our way to The Wig.
As we drove to the Duchess’s residence, England wickets fell and the match seemed to be drifting in The West Indies direction. Daisy and I anticipated a dark mood and we were not disappointed.
Thrown it away, they’ve thrown it away…
…said The Duchess. We set off for Marylebone (the southern end thereof).
The Duchess explained to us, as she had several times before, that Denis (Compton), Ted (Dexter), Colin (Cowdrey) Ken (Barrington), Geoffrey (Boycott) and players of that ilk – whom she had met together with her late husband in the good old days- would not have thrown it away like this.
We arrived at The Wigmore Hall. England hadn’t lost a wicket for a while. Was it possible that they could snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat?
Daisy parked up – it was a warm sunny evening so we sat in the car with the roof open and the car radio on, listening to the denouement of the cricket match.
Try to imagine the scene, dear reader, as it must have looked to passing tourists who understand little or nothing about cricket. A distinguished-looking septuagenarian with her family sitting in a car leaping around in their seats, oohing and aahing every 45 seconds or so as the commentator spoke.
Then, those same seemingly dignified folk whooping for joy for a while, before sealing up the car and entering the Wigmore Hall. Tourists: meet the English.
Here’s a link to the scorecard and the Cricinfo bumf about the match.
Then the concert.
Basically it was an organ recital of JS Bach works by Jennifer Bate. When you click that preceding link you get some eye candy as well as the organist in question, as Jennifer Bate shares her name with a subsequent Miss England and sporting WAG.
It was a fine concert of mostly well-known Bach organ works. An example of one of the pieces (Bach after Vivaldi as it happens) can be seen and heard below.
A slightly sad coda to this Ogblog piece was the discovery that Jennifer Bate died in March 2020, just a few weeks before I wrote this piece.
Here’s another video of her playing one of the pieces we heard that night; Concerto in C BWV 595 (Ernst arr. Bach).
