Mr Corelli In London, The English Concert & Maurice Steger, Wigmore Hall, 4 April 2011

What a beautiful concert this was.

I love a bit of Corelli under almost any circumstances, but these adaptations of Op 5 concertos for the recorder have an especially soulful and melancholy  timbre.

In the absence of Janie, I snapped up one of the CDs during the interval, as I was so sure she’d love the sound, which she did. We still both listen to this recording rather a lot. Indeed we are listening to it as I type.

Also available as a download now, from Amazon (click the pic) or elsewhere

It isn’t all that often that book to go to the Wigmore Hall on my own. But I really liked the look of this concert and Janie really didn’t fancy a special trip into town on a Monday evening, even for the Wigmore Hall. She was, at that time, normally still working long Monday clinics at her place.

The diary suggests I had worked a long day myself that day, ending up at Lord’s late afternoon, perhaps for a meeting about the Middlesex business plan. I’ll guess that it was the day of the AGM and that I therefore skived the Middlesex AGM that year for this concert.

What dedication to the early music cause and oh boy was it worth it.

The little available on-line about this concert and project can be found through the search term linked here.

The upshot of Janie missing out on this one was probably, in the longer term, good news. Since then, if I say that I shall nevertheless go alone to a concert that I really fancy, Janie usually then relents and agrees to come with me.

A Night At The Proms Without The Duchess But With Trevor Pinnock & The English Concert, 8 August 1999

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:

  • Johann Sebastian Bach, Singet dem Herrn, BWV 225
  • Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 49 in F minor ‘La passione’
  • Joseph Haydn, Non nobis, Domine, Hob. XXIIIa:1
  • Joseph Haydn, Insanae et vanae curae
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Requiem in D minor (compl. Süssmayr).

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 NorrisPinnock 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 StandardPinnock Sutcliffe Standard 09 Aug 1999, Mon Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com