Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
Janie is not quite as keen on St John’s Smith Square as she is on the Wigmore Hall. It’s not quite the same sort of warm, intimate space.
But whenever we go there she realises that she likes the bar in the crypt and that we often hear music that sounds great in a church, which is of course exactly what this venue used to be.
Easter weekend and some baroque music suited to that time of year:
Very high quality singing for a semi-professional choir.
It all sounded beautiful.
It’s not easy to get Janie up into town on a Wednesday evening. But this opportunity to hear a harpsichord recital by Trevor Pinnock was too good to miss.
And boy was it good.
A fascinating programme for the evening, starting in the 16th century and working deep into the 18th.
Click here for the Wigmore Hall programme link for this concert.
For those who don’t click, it is music by Antonio de Cabezón, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, John Bull, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler.
Many and varied.
Below is a YouTube sound piece of the Antonio de Cabezón we heard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK6tKcMKyB4
Below is an interview with Pinnock about his “Journey” project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UF9ug9RlWY
He talks so sensibly and knowledgeably in that interview, as indeed he did when explaining the recital to us on the night.
Anyway, that concert in October 2013 was a delicious as well as interesting listen and such an honour to see Trevor Pinnock perform those works up close.
What a beautiful concert this was.
I love a bit of Corelli under almost any circumstances, but these adaptations of Op 5 concertos for the recorder have an especially soulful and melancholy timbre.
In the absence of Janie, I snapped up one of the CDs during the interval, as I was so sure she’d love the sound, which she did. We still both listen to this recording rather a lot. Indeed we are listening to it as I type.
It isn’t all that often that book to go to the Wigmore Hall on my own. But I really liked the look of this concert and Janie really didn’t fancy a special trip into town on a Monday evening, even for the Wigmore Hall. She was, at that time, normally still working long Monday clinics at her place.
The diary suggests I had worked a long day myself that day, ending up at Lord’s late afternoon, perhaps for a meeting about the Middlesex business plan. I’ll guess that it was the day of the AGM and that I therefore skived the Middlesex AGM that year for this concert.
What dedication to the early music cause and oh boy was it worth it.
The upshot of Janie missing out on this one was probably, in the longer term, good news. Since then, if I say that I shall nevertheless go alone to a concert that I really fancy, Janie usually then relents and agrees to come with me.
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.
Anyway, this concert got us all relaxed and suitably prepared for the following day’s battle playing cricket at Bentley.
A lovely concert at “The Wig”.
Here’s the “playlist”:
In truth I was not familiar with the work of Leo Brouwer. Fabio Zanon is clearly a fan and has (far more recently) produced a helpful explainer video about the composer:
We were really taken with the young guitarist’s playing of Scarlatti sonatas transposed for guitar. Here is a video that shows him in the late 1990s playing three such pieces:
We were very taken with Friday evenings at The Wig in those days – it seemed a very relaxing way to round off a hard week. Writing 25 years later…still does.
