What a lovely, relaxing concert this was. Not so relaxing getting to The Wig on a Friday evening in the run up to Christmas. Nor all that relaxing navigating the inners of a packed Wigmore Hall. But once we were in our seats…bliss.
Janie must have asked me three times if it was ACTUALLY Ton Koopman‘s birthday that day. I said “probably not” and was right, but he had just turned 80 a few week’s before the concert, so this must be his 80th birthday tour.
A man who has dedicated his career to the Baroque canon, we sensed that Koopman surrounds himself with the finest exponents of baroque music, making a happy atmosphere and sound with those people.
All of the pieces were by Telemann. Before the interval, we heard:
Trio Sonata in D minor for recorder, violin and continuo TWV42:d7
Trio Sonata in G minor for oboe, violin and continuo TWV42:g5
Sonata in F minor for bassoon and continuo TWV41:f1
Trio Sonata in F for violin, viola da gamba and continuo TWV42:F10
Quartet in D minor for recorder, traverso, bassoon and continuo from Tafelmusik II TWV43:d1
After the interval we heard:
Trio Sonata in C for recorder, traverso and continuo TWV42:C1
Quartet in G for traverso, oboe, violin and continuo TWV43:G2
Trio Sonata in F for recorder, viola da gamba and continuo TWV42:F3
Quartet in G for recorder, oboe, violin and continuo TWV43:G6
You might get a feel for the sound from the following YouTube, which includes Robert Smith (whom we saw) on the bass viol and focuses on recorder sonatas, of which we heard a few:
Or this one, which is a live performance of a Telemann trio sonata with recorder and viol:
Or this one, a movement from the Oboe Sonata g5 recorded by Ton Koopman and his then mates 30 years ago:
For those who cannot be fussed to click, this is what we heard:
Ahmad Al Khatib – Extract from Suznak Rhapsody
Rihab Azar – Enchanted Weavers
Adnan Abul-Shamat – Hatiha Ya Sah
Rihab Azar – Biography of a Bubble
Rihab Azar – Samaie
Rihab Azar – Questions
Rihab Azar – The Pull of Time
Anouar Brahem – Parfum de Gitane
Rihab Azar -Indulgence
Rihab Azar -Sand, Roots & Blossoms.
Here is a charming video of Rihab Azar playing one of the lovely pieces we heard, Indulgence, on the very same seven-course oud that we heard:
The concert was held in the Learning Room (formerly known as the Bechstein Room), which the Wigmore Hall team had set up beautifully in a “jazz club with tables” style and some suitably Middle-eastern-looking drapes. Very atmpospheric.
Soon after the concert began, an old twerp with a massive Canon camera and several large lenses came forward from the rear of the room and sat next to us at our table, fiddling away with his camera and snapping with seeming abandon. Janie thought he must have been an official publicist or something, until a member of staff stepped forward at the end of the piece and politely but firmly told the geezer that it was not permitted to take pictures during the performance – a fairly obvious point that, in the main hall, would have been made as part of the pre-announcements these days, now that everyone has cameras (smart phones) on them all the time.
The old geezer feigned surprise and confusion. Then he proceeded to fiddle with his equipment ceaselessly during the performance and snap with reckless abandon between each piece.
The staff clearly made a decision, rightly or wrongly, that further intervention would be more disruptive than letting the old git have his way.
Rihab Azar took all this with great grace. She even took with great grace the same geezer stopping the concert just before she played her last piece, with a request for “something old school”, because he hadn’t been expecting her use of the loop pedal and wanted to hear the oud without it.
Rihab sweetly said that she had to play her planned last piece, but that she would additionally play a short traditional piece without loop pedal (I cannot remember what it was, but it was delightful) before the last scheduled piece (which was also but differently delightful).
If you, like the old git, want to hear “old school” oud, here is the Parfume de Gitane piece played by the composer, Anouar Brahem, and his mates back in 1997:
No wonder Rihab Azar was insistent on playing her closing number – it was especially charming and is her latest piece, Sand, Roots & Blossoms. designed to accompany an art exhibition, “The Universe Within”. here is a link to the performance she posted, from that exhibition, a few days after our gig:
At the end of our concert, several members of the audience let the witless git know how they felt about him. One said that he had ruined their enjoyment of the concert, which seemed a bit extreme. We were the closest to his fiddling and we just thought he was a twerp.
Mr Twerp engaged us in conversation once he had beaten back his detractors. He clearly wanted us to know that he was a guitar player (he must have said “Fender” three times) and spoke in critical terms about the loop pedal back-tracking (which we rather liked) and the fact that Rihab Azar “looked at the neck of her instrument too much”.
“Have you ever played a fretless instrument?”, I asked. He hadn’t, but pointed out to me, entirely counterfactually, that the oud has frets…or at least Rihab Azar’s did! (Oh no it doesn’t…oh no it didn’t).
Janie then wondered, given his desire for “old school oud playing”, whether Mr Git had ever been to Syria. Of course he hadn’t. “Oh you should, you’d find it fascinating”, said Janie.
Janie correctly remembered seeing oud playing at Abu Al-Azz in Damascus in 1997
I quietly wondered whether the old geezer would survive 20 minutes in Syria these days. Even in 1997, some diplomacy was needed to navigate the political regime and local sensitivities wherever we went. Perhaps that was in Janie’s mind when she recommended the place to Mr Twerpy Git, the amateur photographer-guitarist.
After we parted company with the fellow, Janie told me that she had wanted to take a picture of him for the blog, but thought him so mercurial that the request might lead to an argument and that permission to publish would probably not be granted. I agreed that her decision was a wise one.
I decided instead to help you visualise this geezer by prompting the DeepAI image generator with the phrase:
Silly Old bald Man taking a photo with a telephoto lens camera
The following image, very much of the right kind, emerged:
We had a lovely time at this concert and for sure will return to “Learning Room Sessions” if the subject matter pleases us.
Let’s leave the last word to Rihab Azar’s beautiful oud-playing:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Soumik Datta getting readyTechnician “turning it up to eleven” for Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt
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.
All the more reason to find out what Viktoria and Misha are up to, musically. Further, we liked the sound of the Brazilian theme for the concert, which we sensed, correctly, would please us.
We enjoyed a light supper of charcuterie and stuff at The Wig before the concert. They do that sort of thing very well these days. While we were eating, the performers were setting up and photographing one another.
The conceit of this concert, if indeed conceit describes this simple rationale, is that Viktoria and Misha perform a selection of the stuff that they like to play together. Their joy in playing this music really came across in performance.
We heard:
Blue Deer by Misha Mullov-Abbado
Brazil by Misha Mullov-Abbado
Shir Lelo Shem by Shalom Hanoch
Adagio & Allegro From Violin Sonata No. 1 in B minor BWV1014 by Johann Sebastian Bach
Moderato from Sonata in D for solo violin Op. 115 by Sergey Prokofiev
Sabiá by Antônio Carlos Jobim
Little Astronaut by Misha Mullov-Abbado
Shanti Bell by Misha Mullov-Abbado
O Silêncio das Estrelas by Lenine & Dudu Falcão
O Cabo Pitanga by Laércio de Freitas
Träumerei from Kinderszenen by Robert Schumann
Tico Tico by Zequinha de Abreu
Here is a lovely example, recorded a few years ago, of them performing one of the above pieces:
Their closing number, Tico Tico, is more than a bit of an earworm for me. Not least, because the Harris family gramophone records included a version of that song by Mickey Katz and His Kosher Jammers. Viktoria and Misha’s version sounded more like the above example and did not sound at all like the following recording:
I sense that Misha and family thought the event went well. Misha and Viktoria certainly look pleased in this green room photo.
Thanks again for allowing me to use your photographs, folks.
This Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert was a bit unusual.
Camerata RCO is the scaled-down chamber orchestra bit of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. They are making a bit of a reputation for themselves playing scaled-down versions of enormous symphonies, such as this sixth one by Anton Bruckner.
But now, having heard them and seen them some more, I realise that The Gesualdo Six are now beyond boy band. They are to 15th/16th century Chansons de Regretz what Taylor Swift is to the 21st century heartbreak song.
Further, the Ges-Ges Boys, much like Tay-Tay, are mastering the art of social media management. When Owain Park announced from the stage that “you can find us on TikTok”, I wondered:
whether he was joking,
how many members of the Wigmore hall audience understood what he meant by TikTok,
was I the only person in the Hall (other than the Ges-Ges Crew) who had a TikTok account.
I can’t be sure about the answer to the second and third question, but I can confirm that Owain Park wasn’t joking.
They are also very good at merchandising. On my 2018 visit Owain tempted me to buy a pre-release version of their first album – English Motets (which includes the track embedded above from TikTok, as it happens). This time he persuaded me to be among the first to buy Queen Of Hearts, the latest album.
To be honest, I don’t really need much persuading and I can confirm that the Gesualdo Six recordings are excellent.
The Gesualdo team themselves staffed the merchandise and payment gadgets during the interval, chatting kindly (and at some cases at length) with the patrons who queued up to buy the recordings. I believe they did that all again at the end of the gig.
I wondered to myself whether Taylor Swift was doing this at her Wembley Stadium concerts – I have heard that she engages with her audience like no other. Possibly Tay-Tay is still there at Wembley, selling, signing and chatting.
Almost all the stuff we heard was from this new Queen of Hearts album. Did I mention that it is available from The Gesualdo Six website – click here. We are loving listening to the albums. I also bought Josquin’s Legacy to add to my collection.
Before the interval we heard:
Antoine Brumel (c.1450-1512) Sub tuum praesidium (pub. 1520)
Josquin des Prez (c.1450-1521) O virgo prudentissima
Loyset Compère (c.1445-1518) Plaine d’ennuy/Anima mea
Antoine Brumel Sicut Lilium
Jean Mouton (c.1459-1522) Ave Maria … virgo serena (pub. c.1520)
Johannes Prioris (fl. c.1485-1512) Dulcis amica Dei (pub. 1508)
Owain Park (b.1993) Prière pour Marie (2023)
Jean Lhéritier (c.1480-1551) Sub tuum presidium a6
After the interval:
Josquin des Prez Petite camusette (pub. 1545)
Antoine de Févin (c.1470-1511) Fors seulement (pub. c.1515)
Jean Mouton De tous regretz
Anon Se je souspire/Ecce iterum attributed to Margaret of
Austria
Costanzo Festa (c.1485-1545) Quis dabit oculis (1514)
Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade (b.1989) Plaisir n’ai plus Commissioned by The Gesualdo Six (2023)
Johannes Prioris Consommo la vita mia
Nicolas Gombert (c.1495-1560) Tous les regretz (pub. 1544)
Below is a video of them singing Josquin’s O Virgo Prudentissima – one of the pieces we heard.
This group is the real deal. Janie and I floated home after the concert.
“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.
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’m not entirely sure what motivated me to book Joe Lovano, as I was aware that he had some connections with that school but also with many other schools of jazz. I played a few snippets on YouTube and reckoned that Janie’s love of the saxophone would conquer all.
The first two or three minutes did not go well. In particular, Marilyn Crispell’s first few bars on the piano sounded really free, really free, really-really-really free, to me.
Were I a praying person, I would have been praying for the gig to warm up.
It did warm up.
I was more impressed by Carmen Castaldi on the drums than Janie was. He was assisted at times by Joe Lovano himself, who not only played the saxophone but also the gongs and a shaky-stick thing which defies description other than the term “shaky stick thing”. It might have been a cacho seedpod stick. I think that both of them also used some loose seedpods a few times. It all felt a bit experimental and “do what you like” at that end of the percussion section.
But heck, this trio is old enough and experienced enough to do what they like. I have said many times that Wigmore Hall is one of the few places left where stewards refer to us, without irony, as young man and young woman. But these days we rarely feel, as we did that evening, that we are youngsters next to all of the performers. No matter.
Here’s a little documentary released by ECM in 2019 when this trio started working together:
Here’s a recording of a whole live gig from 2022 in Luxembourg, some of which will sound much like the music we heard:
At the end of the evening we ran into John Thirlwell, one of my real tennis pals from Lord’s. Come to think of it, Lord’s is the only other place left, apart from Wigmore Hall, where we are still addressed by stewards as young man and young woman without irony.
