Tag: Wigmore Hall

Pergolesi And Vivaldi, Florilegium, Wigmore Hall, 23 May 2010

A simply delightful concert at the Wigmore Hall. Mostly Pergolesi with a bit of Vivaldi thrown in for good measure.

Janie is especially partial to the Pergolesi Stabat Mater. His less well-known Salve Regina and the instrumental pieces were beautiful. In fact the whole concert was utter tonic for our ears.

Florilegium always look as though they enjoy playing together…for all we know they might be masters of deception on stage and like a nest of vipers in the green room…but we suspect that they are as they seem – a serene, coherent unit.

They were promoting their Pergolesi CD at that time and nearly coaxed me into buying yet another disc, but I do already have a couple of complete Pergolesi Stabat Mater recordings.

Here is a very interesting promotional sample from YouTube, with some of the performers explaining the music:

Oh what the heck, that Pergolesi album of theirs is only £8 as an MP3 download and those other Pergolesi pieces were stunningly beautiful. As I write in November 2017, down it all comes like magic through the ether to my computer!

Handel’s 1710: Venice – Hanover – London, London Handel Orchestra, Wigmore Hall, 28 March 2010

A lovely Sunday evening concert at The Wigmore Hall.

Handel was the focus but it included works by some lesser-known characters from that late Baroque period: Agostino Steffani, Francesco Venturini and Nicola Haym.

No, me neither, hence links provided.

The concert was part of that year’s London Handel Festival. I have saved the brochure from the web – here.

Anyway, the music was lovely and as always we found an evening of music at The Wig a most relaxing way to round off a weekend.

L’Invitation Au Voyage – Exploring The Music Of France And Spain, Nash Ensemble & Juan Martín, Wigmore Hall, 6 March 2010

I think this might have been the first time we saw Juan Martín team up with The Nash Ensemble at the Wigmore Hall; something they do irregularly but resolutely.

Not all the sort of music we normally seek out – Janie prefers earlier stuff, but she is partial to a bit of flamenco guitar and Juan Martín sure provides that.

I am especially partial to a bit of De Falla and there was plenty of that on show.

This is a few months ahead of the Wigmore Hall’s on-line archive resource starting, but I have found an on-line review – Jim Pritchard for musicweb-international.com – click here- that sums up the concert very well.

Goodness knows what we ate afterwards. My guess – shawarmas.

Julia Fischer Playing Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Wigmore Hall, 13 & 14 February 2010

Janie and I spent two consecutive evenings at The Wig, where we enjoyed the enchanting sound of Julia Fischer playing:

  • Bach’s three violin sonatas on the Saturday;
  • Bach’s three violin partitas on the Sunday.

The music is, of course, simply divine. I’m no expert, but Julia’s interpretation is full of texture and flavour to my ears.

No mucking about, I bought the CD set there and then – I still listen to them quite often.

The concerts had this superb review in the Guardian – deservedly so.

Truly memorable evenings and a very special way to spend Valentine’s Night too.

Fragments – A Worcester Ladymass, Trio Mediæval, Wigmore Hall, 13 December 2009

Trio Mediæval by Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0

Trio Mediæval, the Bananarama of high quality mediaeval singing, bowled us over with this concert in late 2009. Three Scandanavian sopranos who sing beautifully and look like they are having fun doing so.

This is what we saw:

I have managed to find, on YouTube, a fragment of Trio Mediæval singing some of these fragments, albeit singing them somewhere other than the Wigmore Hall.

It should give you an idea of what we heard:

After the concert I bought their album, Words Of The Angels – we listen to it quite often it is so lovely.

Janie and I were not yet daunted by the dread of going up west that close to Christmas (to be fair, Sunday evening is probably as tolerable as it gets), so we booked this concert for mid December and I’m so glad we did.

A very memorable and enjoyable evening; we also enjoyed a Monday off  work the next day.

Brad Mehldau Trio, Wigmore Hall, 16 October 2009

We had actively encouraged “The Wig” to do more jazz, so booked up a couple of Brad Mehldau’s concerts when he was first appointed jazz curator.

We went to the first of these, Brad playing solo, back in April – click here.

We rather liked it and eagerly awaited the second concert, which was to be a trio with bass and drums, which we thought would be more to our taste.

It was.

Why we subsequently booked to see Brad solo again for stressy pre Christmas 2015, during which we vaguely remembered feeling that we anyway preferred seeing him with a group rather than solo, is a bit of a mystery to me – must have been the Bach link. My bad, as the young folk say.

Anyway, the Trio concert from 16 October 2009 is all explained in the sheet below.

This was one of two gigs that week at The Wig. The other gig was with the saxophonist Joshua Redman, whom we have subsequently seen at the Wigmore Hall. John Fordham in the Guardian gave both very good reviews – here.

 

Jerusalem Quartet & Lawrence Power, Wigmore Hall, 3 October 2009

This concert did more for me than it did for Daisy.

I thought she might like classical music, of the Mozart and Mendelssohn kind, in the form of string quartets rather than the symphonies and orchestral pieces she claims not to like.

Wrong.

She still found them twiddly and not to her taste really.

Not that she minded; an evening at the Wigmore Hall would struggle to be unpleasant.

This is exactly what we saw:

Take my word for it; they were very good.

Baroque In High Definition, Academy of Ancient Music, Wigmore Hall 25 September 2009

The conceit of this tasty concert was to play baroque music that has been used in movies in the last 25 years.

It would have made little difference to us had we remained ignorant of the movie link, but possibly the conceit helped to pull in an audience, not that the Academy of Ancient Music needs much help at the Wigmore Hall on a Friday evening. Perhaps it helped the night before in Cambridge.

Richard Egarr has a very pleasant manner, as do the named soloists for this gig.

This is what we heard:

Just what the doctor ordered after a hard week’s work. Or under any circumstances really.

Middlesex v Essex T20, Lord’s, Followed By Artemis Quartet, Wigmore Hall Lates, 26 June 2009

I often say that there are only two places remaining on earth where staff and stewards still call me “young man”: Lord’s and the Wigmore Hall.

So what better places to celebrate Janie’s birthday than both of those august institutions?

We’d probably booked the Wigmore Hall late night concert before we knew/realised that Middlesex were to play Essex in the T20 tournament at Lord’s that evening. Low marks to the cricket authorities for demographic matching for scheduling that fixture at that venue that night, but they probably won’t make that mistake again in a hurry.

Anyway, Charley “The Gent” Malloy was keen to see that fixture and suggested (once he knew it was Janie’s birthday and that we had a later evening engagement at “The Wig”), that we make that match a couples outing,  with Dot (Mrs Malloy) up for the idea of a T20 game and a picnic at Lord’s. So that’s what we did.

Cricket

Chas and Dot were able to get to Lord’s early, so they established a good spot at the front of the Tavern Stand for us. Their hopes and expectations for the match (as Essex supporters) were much higher than ours as Middlesex supporters. Essex had been doing well in the tournament that year, whereas Middlesex, despite being champions, had been consistently poor. So much so, I had written a scathing “futurology” MTWD match report of the Hampshire away match earlier in the week, before that match even took place.

But of course, as fate would have it, Middlesex played a rare decent match and spoiled Chas and Dot’s fun a bit:

Here is a link to the scorecard.

But it clearly only spoiled their fun a bit, as Chas said in a note the following Monday:

That was a super evening last Friday at Lords with all of us there; it was an absolute delight, although I suspect that the loss by Essex cost them dearly!

Music

The Wigmore Late concert was a real treat for Janie; she loves a bit of Piazzolla and this was a concert full of the stuff.

Here is a link to an interesting article from The Telegraph explaining why this quartet likes playing Piazzolla.

Dying for a Piazzolla?

It was a lovely concert.

It had been a long evening; I recall us going back to the flat feeling very tired but also very happy.

Calefax, Wigmore Hall Lunchtime Concert, 22 June 2009

After all the excitement of the cricket World Twenty20 finals yesterday,  we’d booked a day off the following day and a lunchtime concert at “The Wig”.

Calefax, the Dutch reed quintet, performing their (Raaf Hekkema’s) arrangement of the Goldberg Variations.

The concert was lovely. Different, but lovely.

It was a BBC Radio 3 lunchtime concert – not currently available on iPlayer at the time of writing but you never know unless you click here.

Still, if you want to hear a snippet, you need look no further than the Quodlibet below.