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.
Unusually, this was an afternoon, not an evening concert. It had a very geeky name for a very beautiful concert.
Technically speaking – geeky people took great pains to point out when we all celebrated the new millennium on 31 December 1999 – as there had not been a year zero – the real millennium must be 31 December 2000. The fact that calendars had changed, days added and all sorts was put to one side for those who wanted to celebrate the new millennium on 31 December 2000.
Janie and I just wanted to see this lovely concert and we were not disappointed. We were very keen on Florilegium and Emma Kirkby and the programme was enticing:
Here is a nice vid of James Galway with the Ventian Soloisti under Claudio Scimoni playing La Notte:
Here’s Maria Keohane singing Susser Trost – very Christmassy it sounds to me:
Here is the start of the Pergolesi Salve Regina performed by Florilegium, with Robin Blaze, not with Emma Kirkby. I love this album, which I think I bought at that time – possibly that very night.
Here’s a link to the whole album on YouTube Music.
Here’s Emma Kirkby singing Sweet Bird, with the Academy for Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood – then Music For A While.
Oh boy, can she sing.
I don’t think Florilegium and Emma Kirkby have ever recorded together, so you’ll just need to take our word for it that the combination for the real millennium was the real deal…
…or, as we put it in my log:
Super.
A lovely concert of fairly standard baroque fare, beautifully performed by Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante.
We heard:
There’s not much video of Europa Galante from that early period of their existence – but this one of them performing the delicious Vivaldi RV558 gives a good idea of what they looked and sounded like back then.
The inclusion of some WF Bach was a bit unusual. Biondi hasn’t recorded it and I’m not allowed to embed the linked vid, but you can click through to a video of some other Italian geezers performing it – here.
The Vivaldi RV157 also seems to be a bit rare – Biondi has not recorded it. It’ a very sweet piece. Here is the Iris Ensemble performing it.
If you are in search of the sound of Europa Galante with Fabio Biondi playing lots of Vivaldi of the Op 3 and Op 8 variety, then this playlist of mine on YouTube Music will be for you.
Alternatively, if the orchestral works of WF Bach float your boat, then this playlist is for you. I am pretty sure I bought the first album on that playlist on the back of hearing that sinfonia at The Wig that night.
Gluttons for punishment that year – Janie and I took The Duchess to the Proms yet again.
This concert would have very much been my choice – perhaps endorsed by her ladyship. I am especially partial to Bach two violin concertos and a bit of Mozart 29. The English Chamber Orchestra were one of my favoured bands too. Maxim Vengerov too – what was not to like?
We heard:
Here’s a vivacious live performance of the Bach concerto by the Academie fur Alte Kakes:
Recordings & performances of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in D are as rare as rocking horse shit, but Yehudi Menuhin recorded it:
…and here’s the Concertgebouw lot giving Mozart 29th the full tilt:
Geoffrey Norris liked the gig:
Article from 21 Aug 2000 The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England)
We ate at Atlantis again afterwards. At least it was a Friday evening this time, with no great urgency to rise the next day.
To mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s demise, the Wigmore Hall treated us to a concert entirely comprising his music:
I don’t think the Purcell Quartet ever recorded The Art of Fugue. It does sound great in the string quartet format – here’s the Emerson Quartet’s recording:
The Purcell Quartet did record Bach trio sonatas around that time – the recording sounds great to my ears. I’ll be listening to all of these later – here’s a sample:
I cannot find Fretwork recordings of the pieces we heard that night, but this Netherlands Bach Society recording of “Trauerode” is rather lovely – albeit a larger orchestra than we heard at The Wig:
Here’s a recording of Nancy Argenta singing an aria from a different Bach cantata. It’s a rather yummy sound:
This concert will have been just the ticket for us after a busy week. No doubt one or both of us nodded off during some stage of the proceedings…in a good way.
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.
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 with 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.
To be precise, extracted from my log, we heard:
A 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).
Below is the sort-of programme handed out on the night – it wouldn’t be an organ recital without an organ appeal, now would it?
A delicious concert of baroque, mostly sacred, music at The Wig. We had thrown ourselves into the baroque season that year, venturing even on a Wednesday evening, which was usually off limits in our busy lives back then. I recall that the effort was well worth it.
We heard:
Back then, The King’s Consort was a bit of an “all stars” affair in the early music world, with Carolyn Sampson, Rebecca Outram, Charles Daniels and Andrew Carwood, to name but four, all appearing under Robert King’s banner.
Some unusual pieces in there too. Let’s see if I can dig out some tasty samples. Here’s a sweet performance of the Schmelzer by Ensemble Masques
The Knüpfer was part of The King’s Consort’s recording projects around that time. Here is their recording:
The first of the Bach Masses at the centre of this concert, BWV 235, has been beautifully recorded live by the Netherlands Bach Society.
Here is Herreweghe’s version of the Kyrie from the Bach Mass BWV 236. You can load and click through for the whole of this mass if you wish:
The King’s Consort had also recently recorded the Kuhnau a couple of years before this concert. Here is their beautiful recording.
A pair of baroque concerts over that weekend – Friday evening and Saturday evening. We chose to go and see both. It was part of a series named “Bach & His Contemporaries”.
I logged that Janie and I both described the concerts as:
superb.
On the Friday evening we saw/heard:
On the Saturday evening we heard:
Trevor Pinnock, Rachel Podger and some of the others recorded the Bach trio sonatas that year. I have put together a playlist on YouTube Music which includes those lovely sonatas and some other pieces from the January 2000 weekend – click here to listen to that playlist. Don’t be put off by the strike through on the link – anyone can hear the playlist but you will get adverts if you are not yourself a YouTube Music subscriber.
If you prefer to just click the odd embed, here is one of the Bach sonatas we heard Trevor and Rachel play:
I wasn’t familiar with the work of JCF Fischer. Here’s Trevor Pinnock playing Fischer’s passacaglia, not the chaconne we heard. Still lovely:
Here are some other people playing (part of) the Telemann Overture/Suite that we heard:
The Weiss piece was a delicious listen. Here is Evangelina Mascardi giving it a go.
We heard William Carter play the Weiss at that January 2000 concert, long before Janie’s “mystery punter” evening at the same venue:
Finally, here is a YouTube of the closing number from that brace of delicious concerts, with music so you can play along with it if you wish:
“Wachet Auf” means “Wake Up!”, which was possibly an early call for wokery back in the Baroque period…or possibly not. In any case, I wouldn’t recommend English speakers barking this German language expletive after a couple of G&Ts – it might be misunderstood.
We rated this gig “very good”. Some lesser known works by Bach’s lesser known contemporaries, sandwiched between a bit of Telemann and a bit of Bach:
Here is O Heilige Zeit performed by Solomon’s Knot:
Here is the Krebs Sinfonia, performed by Capella jenensis:
Here is a recording of Wachet Auf by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra under Ton Koopman…
…whom we saw 25 years later performing Telemann sonatas and Tafelmusik at The Wig:
