We liked the sound of this 17th Century alehouse music concert, described thus:
They will transform our candlelit space into something close to a 17th-century alehouse, with a menu of highly entertaining, touching and beautiful folk music.
So we awaited the concert with rapt attention:
In the first half Bjarte Eike explained the 17th century alehouse music phenomenon to us and demonstrated the fusion of serious and folk music through the material played – several pieces of Purcell for example. Some with Shakespearean themes to make us feel at home; Timon Of Athens, Midsummer Night’s Dream, you get the idea.
In truth, we found the first half of the concert far more to our taste than the second half. The first half had a bit of audience participation with a sea shanty and stuff, but the second half seemed to weird out completely, seeming more like a bawdy modern Gaelic cèilidh than a 17th century alehouse.
Of course this was never really meant to be a truly authentic depiction, but we felt the project must have run out of material that related to its purpose, or simply found that they could only get the audience going by playing more familiar stuff.
It just felt a bit gratuitously bawdy at times and bit of an ego trip for some of the performers to show off their favourite tricks.
Here is a link to the Shakespeare’s Globe page on the event we attended.
Below is a video of the performers taken recently.
I must say The Globe rather irritates us now. The bars and other audience facilities are very utilitarian and the bars always seem to have just run out of the thing you want. There’s something a bit amateurish and/or touristic about the whole set up; the prices are far from amateur.
But the setting is superb and was ideal for this concert – or at least what this concert was purported to be.
We enjoyed our evening but we won’t be rushing back, either to Barokksolistene or The Globe.