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.
Janie really was on a Baroque kick at that time – we even booked a Monday evening concert on a working day. Janie had cunningly arranged to see Carita, our dental hygienist, around the corner in Cavendish Square, but then ended up having to move that appointment. Once again, in the end, I recall that Janie hot-footed it (if you can hot-foot in a car) to the Wig, after making a late client visit.
But it was worth it.
I had encouraged Janie to see Roy Goodman and The Brandenburg Consort, as her treasured recording of the Brandenburg Concertos is their 1992 recording – and jolly good it is too.
Anyway, this concert focussed more on CPE than JS Bach, and was mostly an opportunity for Rachel Brown to show off her flute skills, which she did with aplomb.
We heard:
Below is a link to Rachel Brown performing some utterly delightful Quantz with Roy Goodman and his other lot – The Hanover Band.
Here is the JS Bach Sinfonia from BWV 209 which we heard at the end of the concert:
You’ll get the idea – the concert on 17 July 2000 was a feast for our ears – we metaphorically floated home.
