All music by William Lawes, this is what we heard:
Choice Psalmes: – Music, the master of thy art is dead
Harp Consort No. 9 in D:– Pavin on a theme by Cormacke
Choice Psalmes: – My God, my rock, regard my cry
My God, my rock, regard my cry (arranged by Loris Barrucand)
Judah in exile wanders
Harp Consort No. 5 In D: – Alman – Saraband
Harp Consort No. 4 in D: – Coranto
Choice Psalmes: – Whieles I this standing lake swathed up with ewe
Love, I obey, shoot home thy dart
O sing unto the Lord a new song
Harp Consort No. 11 in D: – Fantazy
Choice Psalmes: – Ne irascaris, Domine
Harp Consort No. 10 in G: – Paven on a theme by Coprario
Choice Psalmes: – How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord
Come sing the great Jehova’s praise
In resurrectione tua
Harp Consort No. 8 in G
Choice Psalmes: – O my Clarissa
This concert is basically their latest album Lighten Mine Eies, available I’m sure at all good CD outlets and streaming, e.g. YouTube Music – click here.
Below is a little video clip of them performing one of the instrumental pieces:
While below is a little video clip of them performing one of the choral pieces:
We were supposed to hear Maïlys de Villoutreys sing the soprano parts, but she was unfortunately unwell. Enter a late replacement in the form of Marion Tassou, who did a wonderful job given the near-absence of preparation and rehearsal time.
Ensemble Près are a very together-looking unit, handling the late soprano switch like the commensurate professionals they clearly are.
We really enjoyed this concert and have enjoyed listening to their recordings of 16th and 17th century English music since. An unusual choice of repertoire for a young French ensemble. I hope it works for them.
Robin Pharo, their leader and gambist, did mention that they have started work on some French repertoire as well. Quelle surprise!
Our first Wigmore Hall concert of the year. We had been looking forward to this concert as something rather different…which it was. It was also very different from the concert as promoted. The rubric mentioned banjo and tambourine. Rhiannon apologised for that, as she explained that she and Francesco were currently working on voice and piano.
No-one seemed to mind. The audience mostly comprised Rhiannon fans, from what we could make out. We didn’t recognise fellow Wigmore-istas. Which is a good thing in our view. We are great believers in the Wig opening up to different artists and styles.
The music Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi played us was delightful and of the highest quality, albeit relentlessly downbeat in mood. Leonard Cohen and John Dowland had nothing on this pair in the gloom department.
Rhiannon is a charismatic performer, who can clearly shift between musical styles and spoken languages in a seemingly effortless way.
She did get caught out on the piece they were premiering that night, when the music page technology let her down. She stopped, explained the problem and asked if we wanted her to start again?
Yes please…
…we all shouted. So she started again.
Francesco explained with great enthusiasm that he had been afforded the honour and opportunity to play The Old Lady – the older of the two Steinway pianos at The Wig that rarely gets an outing. I had thought that the piano looked a little different when we arrived. The headline photo shows The Old Lady with our reflections in it as I snapped it on exit.
There’s not a lot of on-line video showing Rhiannon Giddens performing with Francesco Turrisi, but the following YouTube (which also includes one other musician), shows one of the most moving pieces they played: American Tune by Paul Simon:
We thoroughly enjoyed this concert and will look out for other concerts in Rhiannon Giddens Wigmore Hall residency. We might get to hear the banjo and tambourine next time. Or something completely different. I don’t suppose we’d much mind.
To the Wigmore Hall for an evening of Jazz. We hadn’t yet seen jazz pianist/arranger/composer Emmet Cohen, although I think he has been curating the jazz at Wigmore Hall for a while now. Emmet’s previous dates/gigs hadn’t worked for us.
This was a good chance to see him with a couple of his regular buddies as a trio: Joey Ranieri on bass and Joe Farnsworth on percussion.
Calm before the storm
We heard:
Frederick Loewe – I’ve grown accustomed to her face
Bud Powell – Budo
Ernesto Lecuona – La Comparsa
Ralph Blane & Hugh Martin – The Trolley Song
Tadd Dameron – If You Could See Me Now
Ray Brown – Lined With a Groove
Emmet Cohen – Universal Truth Suite: I. Compassion, II. Eternal Glimpse, III. Universal truth
Scott Joplin – Original Rags (arranged by Emmet Cohen)
Harold Mabern – Rakin’ and Scrapin’ (arranged by Emmet Cohen)
Here’s a YouTube of the three of them playing together in Switzerland a couple of years ago – but not playing one of the pieces we heard:
They look a bit less joyous in Switzerland – possibly they were on “stronger meds” when at The Wig. The audience for sure were well “medicated” – the bar was heaving with people before the concert…as were the loos. Very few familiar faces – not many of us Wigmore Hall Mafia dig early music and jazz.
Here is a link to the entire gig that those three did in Amsterdam a few days before they arrived at The Wig – there will be many similarities and overlaps:
I’m guessing that the Dutch do better meds than Swiss.
Of course, this is incredibly accomplished stuff and Janie and I enjoyed ourselves very much.
Some of the music choices are not quite to our taste – tunes from musicals of the 40s and 50s tend to sound corny to our ears and, to some extent, even more so when syncopated into cool jazz. The Trolley Song, in particular, could, for me, only conjure up a vision of Judy Garland dressed in Edwardian finery.
The only other issue we have with this style of jazz concert is the “mutual admiration society” style chat, about each other and about jazz masters past and present with whom they have worked. I realise that there is a type of jazz maven who likes to hear all that stuff, but we prefer to let the music speak for itself. There’s also something “not quite our style” about self-aggrandisement.
But this nit-picking does not detract from a thoroughly enjoyable evening of top quality jazz musicianship, for which we are grateful. We think the acoustics of the Wigmore Hall work brilliantly for small jazz combos such as this trio, although Emmet suggested at one point that he finds the acoustics of the hall “a bit weird”.
Anyway, as Janie and I have said repeatedly to the powers that be at The Wigmore Hall over the years with regard to jazz – more of this please.
It’s difficult to come up with appropriate adjectives for someone like Kit Armstrong. He studied composition and started playing the piano at the age of five, enrolled on undergraduate courses in biology, physics, mathematics and music at the age of nine, graduated in music at age 16 and completed an MSc in mathematics age 20. Words like “prodigy” and “genius” seem insufficient.
…as I was keen to include some Byrd and Bull in the performance, which led me to Kim Armstrong’s magnificent album William Byrd & John Bull from 2021.
I was keen to see him live, so couldn’t resist the opportunity at The Wigmore Hall, despite Janie’s (and my) resistance to braving that area in the run up to Christmas.
By Sunday 22 December things should have simmered down around there…
…I said. I was right. Our journey and the parking was just fine.
To add to the charm of the evening, my tennis friend John Thirlwell was there with his companion. They made pleasant company before the concert and during the interval.
Mr Thirlwell relaxing after doing battle on the tennis court at Lord’s
Kit Armstrong had chosen a quirky selection of pieces. He explains his choice in the following promo vid:
We were especially taken by the Saint-Saëns (I have long loved that piece), the Leopold Godowsky (new to both of us as composer and piece alike) and the Arvo Pärt (we didn’t know the piece but tend to like Part’s charming minimalism.)
I have had trouble tracking down the encore, but I am pretty sure it was Baude Cordier – Belle, Bonne, Sage, as I cannot imagine that there are too many pieces from around 1400 which the composer set out in the shape of a heart. Cute.
In truth I don’t think the piece worked well as a piano transcript – it is more lovely to my ears as a vocal rondeau.
Still, it was a superb concert. Janie and I were enthralled by it and so glad we made the effort to go to The Wig just before Christmas!
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.
