Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
A very beautiful, flute-based, baroque concert. What more could one ask for at the start of a new year – our first concert of 2009?
All three are excellent musicians and they played beautifully individually and together.
This is what they played:
We went home very happy – I suspect with some Ranoush shawarmas in our hands.
We have been enthusiasts of Jazz at the Wigmore Hall ever since we saw the Tord Gustavsen Trio at “The Wig” as part of the London Jazz Festival a few years earlier.
This Kenny Warner and Martin Speake concert was very good, although (to our taste) not quite as suited to the Wigmore Hall as the smaller, tighter sound of ensembles such as Tord Gustvsen’s.
But what do we know?
In this excellent review from Jazzwise Magazine – click here – Martin Speake himself says:
‘Even the handclaps sound good in this room’
It does thrill us to witness, so often, performers clearly in awe of the venue and so delighted to be able to play there. It makes us realise how lucky we are to live so close to the place, to be friends of it and to attend so regularly. As I write this note (10 April 2017) I am looking forward to a visit to the Wig this very evening…but for early music, not jazz this time.
Returning to the Kenny Warner and Martin Speake – we actually got the latter in the first half and the former in the second half.
We enjoyed both – I got more out of the Kenny Warner which had a Dixieland sound to it which pleases me more than it pleases Janie.
Still, a lovely way to spend a Sunday evening, especially when you have booked the day off work Monday.
Janie and I like a bit of viol music.
The Birds On Fire page of Fretwork’s own site – click here – sets out the whole concert and indeed details of the CD album they brought out in 2008, a few months before this performance.
Here are some reviews of the album from the Fretwork site.
The story of Jewish composers and musicians in the Tudor period is a fascinating one. In theory they were banned from England at that time. In practice, blind eyes were turned when the Tudor court wanted some of the best musicians in Europe to pop in.
In truth, the music was not, to our ears, the most pleasing Tudor period viol music we’d heard. Fretwork are and as always were top notch on this evening, but the modern Orlando Gough work inspired by the story and indeed some of the material, especially the songs, were not so much to our taste.
Still, it was beautiful and interesting and we were very glad we’d booked this concert.
Janie and I had booked the next day (Monday) off. My diary suggests that we simply used that day to sort out stuff and do our own thing. But whatever the plan, we do enjoy a Sunday evening concert that much more when we know we don’t have to work the next day.
Writing this Ogblog piece made me realise that I don’t have any Fretwork in my collection at all. I put that right, but not with Birds On Fire…
Janie likes a bit of sax. So a quartet of saxophonists playing Italian Baroque at the Wigmore hall seemed right up our street.
At the time of writing, I have had a more recent sax quartet experience – click here – having retained only a vague memory of having seen a sax quartet before. This Copenhagen Saxophone Quartet experience was it.
Judging from their website activities page – click here – this appearance at the Wigmore Hall might have been the end of the story for this troupe, even if at the time of booking it might have seemed like a big break near their beginning.
The concert does have an instant encore listing, though, which I am delighted to link here, although (at the time of writing) I am the only person to confess to having been at the concert. I think there were quite a few of us in, but perhaps not the packed Saturday night the Wig and the quartet might have hoped for.
Which is all a shame, as they were rather good, as was their interesting choice of music. I remember them describing their instruments and the pieces they were playing rather well.
I seem to recall that the baroque pieces did more for us than the modern ones. I also recall feeling that saxophone might not be the ideal instrument for baroque music – all sentiments that returned to me when I saw the Ferio Quartet at SJSS in December 2016 – click here.
Anyway, this concert got us all relaxed and suitably prepared for the following day’s battle playing cricket at Bentley.
An unusual mixture of the vaguely familiar and less familiar Italian Baroque and its aftermath. The list of composers reads like an Italian restaurant menu or perhaps the lyrics of Mambo Italiano.
Fabio Biondi is a bit of a showman, I seem to recall, which is not necessarily the style that floats Janie’s boat, but it seems almost compulsory to perform Vivaldi that way these days. Although these particular Vivaldi concertos are not the best known ones, there’s always something fairly familiar about the Vivaldi concerto sound. No bad thing.
The second half of the concert was more subdued and in many ways more interesting, as I’m not sure I’d ever heard any Sammartini, Nardini or Brioschi before. Well worth a listen, but nothing so wow that I’m desperate for a recording or rushing back for more in the concert hall.
There’s no Wigmore Hall stub for this concert – those start from January 2012, but there is an Instant Encore entry, click here, so far I am the only person to confess to having attended this concert. Not even the Orchestra…
Joking apart, it was a very good concert, just one of those low key Sunday night at the Wigmore Hall affairs.
There is a good preview of this concert in The Cardinall’s Musick’s newsletter of February 2008 – click here. Apparently this concert was their first appearance at The Wig for quite a while. If I recall correctly, we had seen them before at St John’s Smith Square.
They really are a superb early music outfit. Andrew Carwood tries hard to explain the context of the work – perhaps he over-explains at times for our taste, but the music always sounds divine and the scholarship that underpins their work is evident for all to hear.
This type of concert is always a wonderful way to end the working week and I’m sure this occasion was no exception.
This is exactly what we heard – lovely.
We bought three CDs of The Cardinall’s Musick delivering their wonderful stuff. While I’m not 100% sure that we bought them on this occasion, I have a strong hunch that I did:
Very beautiful recordings, I still (writing in 2016) listen to this music quite a lot.
My diary says “Wigmore Hall” for that Sunday, but no further details and (most unusually) no programme in my collection.
Further, we went off crack of dawn the next morning as we were due to take an early flight the to Barcelona – even in those days I don’t think we booked up stuff so tight.
So my guess is that we attempted to book that concert but didn’t get the seats we wanted; then planned our trip to Barcelona accordingly.
But if by any chance we did see this concert, it is written up very nicely on Intermezzo – here.
This concert was sponsored by the Tabor Foundation, so Janie and I went along and hoity-toitied with Michael and Doreen Tabor, plus Angela Broad and I think Catriona Oliphant was also there that evening.
Anyway, this was a young musician concert and a very impressive young pianist is/was David Greilsammer. I can only find one preview of this concert – in the Telegraph – click here.
This review in Classical Source is enthusiastic and helpful – click here.
I’m not sure why we feel this way, but we sense something a little cliquey and clinical about the Academy of Ancient Music – perhaps it is the corporate-style branding.
The music of course is beautiful. Not quite sure why I chose this particular serving of fairly standard baroque concert fare, especially on an inconvenient Wednesday night for Janie. I think I might have been itching to hear the BWV1042 violin concerto live and wondering about Locatelli.
We enjoyed it all well enough.
We were supposed to see someone else. Was it Paco Pena? Juan Martin? Yet another well-known guitarist?
Anyway, we weren’t supposed to see Tom Kerstens.
Had we known his relative quality, we’d have accepted the offer of our money back rather than persevered with a Sunday evening concert substitute. But we thought, heck, give the fellow a try. Oh dear.
Still, we’d had a corker of a month in the theatre and music department until this point. Here’s the programme (yes, really) – let’s draw a veil.
