Gurdain Rayatt getting ready
We don’t really patronise The Wigmore Hall for the wow factor. We quite like the fact that we are quite often amongst the youngest people in the audience. We like early music and we get a good dose of that from The Wig.
But we do sometimes book a concert at The Wigmore Hall that we think might have a wow factor and sometimes, like on this occasion, we call it right. It does tend to mean that we are bringing the average age up rather than down, though.
Here is a link to The Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.
We have seen O/Modernt before, under the enthusiast auspices of Hugo Ticciati:
They like a bit of fusion, do the O/Modernt gang. On this occasion, it was an East/West fusion that they explored, as well as a temporal “Bach to Beatles” shtick.
Here’s what we heard:
- Johann Sebastian Bach – Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue BWV1080
- Pēteris Vasks – Concerto No. 2 ‘In Evening Light’ UK première I. Andante con passione • II. Andante cantabile • III. Andante con amore
- Max Richter – On the Nature of Daylight
- Soumik Datta – Migrant Birds from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
- John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Blackbird (arranged by Johannes Marmén)
- Soumik Datta – 1947 from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
- Jordan Hunt – Misremembrance
- Wojciech Kilar – Orawa
- Soumik Datta – Awaaz from Awaaz (arranged by Jordan Hunt)
- John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Across The Universe (arranged by Johannes Marmén, plus sarod & tabla riff) – encore
To give you a feel for what we heard, here is a clip from O/Moderndt playing Distant Light by Pēteris Vasks. The piece we heard was the follow-up concerto by Vasks. It was a nice touch to have Vasks at The Wig for his premier – I even managed to congratulate him in person as we were leaving the hall.
The sarod, tabla and a heap of special furniture/equipment arrived during the interval for the second half of the show.
There’s no video to be found of O/Modernt and the sarod & tabla fellas all playing together, but here is a 15-year-old clip of Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt playing as a pair, which will give you a feel.
Here is a more recent recording of that pair playing together:
The most “wow” piece of the evening was Orawa by Wojciech Kilar. Here is that piece played by a more formal orchestra than O/Modernt.
The encore had to calm us down again, which it did. Here’s what Across The Universe sounds like in O/Modernt’s hands.
The sarod & tabla coda to the Across The Universe encore helped us all to float away from The Wig.
We heard several younger members of the audience saying that they had been blown away by the evening. This is surely the sort of thing The Wigmore Hall should be doing more often.
