Tag: Sergio Bucheli

John Dowland And His Cheery Pals, Tim Mead & Sergio Bucheli, Wigmore Hall, 16 September 2024

John Dowland, CC BY-SA 4.0 click here for details

OK, I have a confession to make. The Wigmore Hall did not title this concert “John Dowland And His Cheery Pals”; it merely promised us the superb countertenor Tim Mead and the also excellent lutenist/theorboist Sergio Bucheli.

On arrival, I made a bee-line to the desk where a young woman was handing out programmes. I told Janie that the programme was bound to include a lyric sheet so we all could sing along.

Don’t be ridiculous…

…said Janie.

Have fun…

…said the far more open-minded young lady.

We found ourselves sitting next to a Scottish woman named Fiona, who had sung in her youth and was clearly a huge fan of Tim Mead. She said she might inadvertently sing along, which Janie tells me Fiona sort-of did – under her breath. I chose not to sing along, partly because Tim Mead sings in the wrong pitch for me. I might have tried singing a whole octave down, but wouldn’t have wanted to upstage Tim that way.

More seriously, it was a truly lovely concert. Here is a link to that very programme and song sheet if you want to see what the whole thing contained.

I was familiar with many of the John Dowland songs and lute fantasias, whereas some of the material by other composers was new to me.

We were particularly taken with John Danyel’s three part song, “Mrs M E her funeral tears for the death of her husband”…

…did those guys compete for maximum misery in the subject matter of their songs in those days?…

…a truly beautiful sound that has made me seek out some more John Danyel to hear after the concert.

Here is a link to the first part of the Mrs ME song – don’t be put off if you see a line through the link – it should work for you even if you are not a YouTube Music subscriber.

Tim Mead does a lot of his work with La Nuova Musica – in fact Janie and I didn’t realise that we had seen Tim sing before at one of their concerts – at St John’s Smith Square in 2015:

La Nuova Musica, St John’s Smith Square, 20 March 2015

We had seen Sergio Bucheli several times before, most recently at Wigmore Hall just a few months ago:

All The Bs: Biber, Benjamin, Byrd, Bach…& Brett – Brett Dean Concert, Wigmore Hall, 20 April 2024

We enjoyed every bit of the Dowland and Pals concert, despite the downcast subject matter. With Dowland you can be pretty sure about what you are going to get. Otherwise it would be a bit like going to a Leonard Cohen concert and complaining that the songs are miserable.

Tim Mead and Sergio Bucheli seemed very much at home in this late Renaissance space, although my guess is that home base for them is Baroque music from 70 to 100 years later than the works we heard. I cannot find a sample of these two performing late Renaissance works, but this sampler from their recent album about Purcell And His Perky Pals (OK, it’s actually named Beauteous Softness)…

… has inspired me to stream that album as soon as I have some proper listening time…which might be as soon as 24 hours after the Dowland & Pals concert.

All The Bs: Biber, Benjamin, Byrd, Bach…& Brett – Brett Dean Concert, Wigmore Hall, 20 April 2024

“Don’t mess with my partitas, mate!”, Heinrich Biber

Hmmm, we were neither of us sure about this one. We really enjoyed bits of it, while spending some of our listening time hoping for certain pieces to end.

My bad in choosing it.

Here’s a link to the Wigmore Hall stub for the programme we saw. If that ever fails, you can find the pdf programme here.

I guess my eyes were caught by the names Biber, Byrd and Bach, without twigging quite how much contemporary composition we were also to hear. I also spotted that Lawrence Power and Sergio Bucheli were involved – we had very much enjoyed their lunchtime concert last year.

Imitations: Lawrence Power & Sergio Bucheli At The Wigmore Hall, Plus Other Activities, 24 April 2023

Queenslander Brett Dean comes across as a genuinely nice bloke who surrounds himself with musicians who like to play with him. His compositions, though, borrow from well-known composers and tunes, deconstructing and reconstructing them in ways that could only please ears wired differently from ours.

Brett claimed that the music in his concert spanned the 16th to the 21st century, only omitting the 19th century. I would dispute that claim. His “some birthday” piece of 1992 is a sort-of variations on the tune we know as “Happy Birthday To You”, which was first published in 1893 as “Good Morning To All” in “Song Stories for the Kindergarten” by Patty and Mildred J. Hill. While the Hill’s copyright is famously disputed, that tune is surely 19th century.

Here’s the oldest known version – let’s not even think about what Brett’s version looks like on the page

Anyway…

…here’s a nice recording of the first movement of Biber’s 7th parthia, which was the first piece we heard:

Janie and I both found George Benjamin‘s piece too weird for us. George kindly turned up to take the applause afterwards – turns out he’s a Londoner. Here’s a recording of it enabling you to judge for yourselves:

Byrd’s Fantasia pieces are lovely little vignettes. That segment was too short (or there were too few of them) for my taste. Here’s a nice example of one played by a consort of viols (almost certainly what Byrd had in mind) rather than violas and cello – which we heard and still sounded lovely:

The highlight of the evening, for us, was to see the young gifted harpsichordist/pianist Xiaowen Shang play with such joy and expression. For us she played Byrd’s Earl of Salisbury pavan and galliard, plus The Bells – both favourites of mine – on the harpsichord. Below, a video of her playing a lovely piece of Bach on the piano:

The Earl of Salisbury pavan is such a favourite of mine. Xiaowen played it beautifully, if a little twiddley for my taste. Below is Janie’s hand-held recording of Reuben Ard playing it on the electric virginals at Hampton Court Palace last year, for my Gresham Society event there:

Let’s not talk too much about the things Brett Dean did to Byrd’s beautiful pavan and his take on Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 6. Imagine PDQ Bach in a really bad mood, unable to make jokes.

“There’s nothing funny about feet either” (Janie, attrib. PDQ Bach)

It seemed to take an age to segue from Brett’s “treatment” to the concerto itself, which was a rather glorious and suitable choice of closing number for a concert that focussed to a large extent on the idea of two violas. By the time the concerto finally arrived, we thought we’d more than earned some ear candy.

Here’s a lovely rendering of the Bach by some sensible Dutch people who don’t mess with it:

“Is that it?”, asked Janie as the applause rang out for the Brandenburg.

“I do hope so”, I said.

“Will they play an encore?”, Janie persisted.

“I do hope not”. They didn’t.

Imitations: Lawrence Power & Sergio Bucheli At The Wigmore Hall, Plus Other Activities, 24 April 2023

The theme of this rather wonderful BBC Lunchtime Concert at Wigmore Hall was imitations. All of the pieces had themes within them in which the music imitates some sort of natural sound.

Janie and I thought this was an excellent and very interesting concert. We very nearly missed it, as I, in an extremely rare omission, forgot to write this Wigmore Hall date in our diaries when I booked this back in February. It was only because there was a small change to the programme that I was alerted to my omission and fortunately we were both able still to make the date.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall stub for the concert, which lists the pieces, most of which were baroque period but a few of which were modern imitations. If that fails, the pdf programme can be found here.

The headline picture is sort-of an imitation too – that painting by Jan Voorhout was once thought to be Dieterich Buxtehude, the composer of the first piece we heard, but is now believed simply to be a domestic music scene of that baroque period.

The Wigmore Hall concert was streamed live and the stream remains available for three months after the performance – if you have reached this Ogblog in time click here to see and hear the concert.

Alternatively, if you are a podcastista and prefer to listen on BBC Sounds, click here – this link good for 30 days after the broadcast.

If you just fancy one little listen to some Baroque imitation, then the third movement of this sonata by Johann Paul von Westhoff, which we heard, should thrill your ears.

Continuing the theme of imitation, I suppose I spent the day “imitating” a young man. I have said in recent years that there are now only three places left where people sometimes call me “young man” without irony: Wigmore Hall, Lord’s and Gresham Society. Today I enjoyed all three.

After Wigmore Hall, I went on to lord’s for a cracking game of real tennis doubles.

2016 Picture by Toni Friend – I was so much younger then

Then on to the National Liberal Club for the Gresham Society AGM and dinner. For reasons known only to him (and in a style only Tim could muster), Professor Connell invited me to sit at the top table:

Would you care to join us on the top table tomorrow night?

Everyone else has refused and it will look a bit odd if there is no-one on it.

It would have been hard to refuse such a courteous request.

Tim Connell promised to keep the formal AGM bit to seven minutes but those around me suggested that he strayed into the 10-15 minutes zone, as usual.

Worse yet, despite spending the day in all three places where I am still occasionally addressed as “young man”, no-one had done so that day and no-one did so that evening.

Still, I chatted with lots of interesting people and enjoyed a good dinner.

Sir Thomas Gresham: 1519-1579 – I’m even older than him now