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 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).
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:
The then young Austrian pianist, Till Fellner, played a mixture of Bach and Beethoven that night:
This concert helped to cement Janie’s view that she is more a Bach person than a Beethoven person. I enjoyed all of it.
Here’s a recording of Till Fellner playing book one of The Well-Tempered Clavier with wonderfully light touch:
Here’s Andras Schiff playing and lecturing on the Beethoven A major sonata some 15 years later at The Wig:
Excellent concert, this. Sonnerie was a superb but fluid ensemble, led by the indomitable Monica Huggett.
On this occasion they comprised Monica Huggett, Gary Cooper, Wilbert Hazelzet, Pamela Thorby, Catherine Latham, Katherine McGillivray, Catherine Martin, Emilia Benjamin, Alison McGillivray and Sarah Groser.
Here is the playlist from the gig:
Here is a clip from an earlier but lovely recording of the E major Telemann piece, which includes Monica Huggett with the Academy of Ancient Music
While here is a lovely video of Ensemble Odyssee playing the Bach concerto we heard that evening:
We both went straight from work and both had early starts the next morning, so I guess we supped light at Sandall Close after the gig.
Liberated from hosting The Duchess at The Proms, Janie and I went along to this concert on a Sunday evening planning nothing more than a light supper at my flat after the show. It was a Sunday evening and we both had ridiculously early starts the next morning.
Here’s the running order:
This was an excellent concert. You don’t need to take my word for that – it seems it got rave reviews afterwards. It has taken me 25 years to check out those rave reviews, but that’s me.
Here’s Geoffrey Norris in The Telegraph:
Pinnock Telegraph Norris 09 Aug 1999, Mon The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Tom Sutcliffe in the Standard was a little more equivocal, but still wrote very well of the gig.
Pinnock Sutcliffe Standard 09 Aug 1999, Mon Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Unusual for us to go to a concert on a Thursday evening in those days. I don’t think I’d yet heard The Goldberg Variations live and was keen to do so.
Jean-Louis Steuerman, that boy can sure tinkle the ivories.
Take my word for it.
Actually, no need for you to take my word for it – here’s that very chap playing that very aria:
I told you he can play.
25 years ago, Janie and I decided to party like it’s 1999 at the start of 1999. What better to do that than a concert of baroque music at The Wigmore Hall.
These are the pieces we heard/saw:
The Standard previewed the concert thusly:
Standard Kontrabande 6 Jan 1999 06 Jan 1999, Wed Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Perhaps there was a change of programme or perhaps my notes missed out the Handel by mistake. I’ll check back to the programme when next I can face the thought of an archaeological dig into my programme collection.
For sure we saw the small chamber ensemble, Kontrabande, with Charles Humphries doing the counter-tenor bit and Clare Salaman on the baroque violin. Sadly, I learn that Clare, who was an expert on strange and ancient instruments, didn’t make it to the 25th anniversary of this Kontrabande concert.
Here’s a video of Clare playing a strange and ancient instrument – the nyckelharpa – I don’t believe I have ever seen this instrument played live:
Here is an audio YouTube of Charles Humphries singing one of the Bach arias we heard, vergnugte Ruh, accompanied by Kontrabande:
While here is the Bremer Baroque Orchestra (similar scale to Kontrabande if I remember correctly) playing the very Telemann concerto we heard back then:
