What a wonderful way to end the working week; a concert of beautiful early music. We’ve seen Stile Antico before at the Wigmore Hall; they are a truly inspirational vocal ensemble.
We ran into Eric Rhode and his wife, Maria at this concert, as often we do. He is no doubt at the Wigmore Hall even as I write, as I know there is early music on there right now, a couple of weeks’ after the Stile Antico event.
Revisiting this article in May 2020 during Covid-19 lockdown, I am glad to see that, in 2015, Stile Antico showed off their skills by singing Renaissance pieces that were designed for 12 voices. Lockdown has strangely enabled the group to multiply virtually, producing the following delicious 40 part performance of Tallis’s Spem In Alium:
But in truth, the concert we heard that might would have looked and sounded more like the following recording from 2013 of William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus at The Wig itself:
Below is a vid of Stile Antico, singing Ego flos campi by Jacobus Clemens non papa, which was the second piece they sang to us and which gives a very good sense of their glorious sound:
Coincidentally, the above recording was made at the Old Royal Naval College which I shall be visiting in a few day’s time (as I write in January 2018), although not for music purposes.
For those who are not blessed with Latin scholarship, “Ego flos campi” means, “I maintain my oral hygiene when I go camping”…
…although those words are occasionally mistranslated by so-called experts as, “I am the flower of the field”.
Actually Julian Bream had to drop out of this concert at the last minute, so we got everyone else, but not him. We also got all the other pieces, but not the Bach Cello suite on the guitar.
I made no note about a replacement piece, so I suspect we had a shortened concert. This is what we heard:
Thomas Tallis – Loquebantur
John Taverner – Quemadmodum
William Byrd – Tribue, Domine
Fryderyk Chopin – Ballade No 1 in G minor, op 23
Johannes Brahms – Intermezzo in A major, op 118 no 2 –
Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner – Isoldens Liebestod
Leos Janacek – String Quartet no 2
My only other log note is that we bumped into James Davidson, who was (or probably by then, had been) the Director of Finance at Cancer Research Campaign, one of my earliest Z/Yen clients in the mid 1990s. He lived nearby in Notting Hill Gate and used to address me (in the street or at CRC) as “Lord Harris”, because he said my fee rates were so high. When we asked him for a testimonial to put on our spanking new Z/Yen website, he said:
expensive, but worth it…
…which we thought at the time was as good as it gets.
I suspect that this Tuesday night charity concert was expensive but worth it too.
Sadly, Julian Bream never recorded his live party piece of playing the BWV1012 Cello Suite on the guitar, but here’s a recording of a fine guitarist, Paulo Martelli, who has recorded his playing of part of it live:
So there’s the stuff we didn’t see or hear.
Here’s a recording of the Tallis Scholars singing Loquebantur, which is wonderful:
Here’s the Gesualdo Six singing Taverner’s Quemadmodum
Back to The Tallis Scholars, as there is a vid of them singing The Byrd:
PHILLIPS: Hey, are you looking at my Byrd?
There’s not a lot of Martin Roscoe to be found on-line – but here is Krystian Zimerman playing the Chopin:
I don’t suppose the Janáček string quartet much pleased us. Here’s the Amphion String Quartet doing their level best with it:
