Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
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.
At the end of a stressy week, what could be better than an evening of jazz at Thw Wigmore Hall?
And what a stressy week it had been – with the deal to sell most of the business to Aon/McLagan Partners due to complete that week but actually not completed until the following week.
In truth, I don’t remember all that much about this concert other than the joy of sitting and letting a very accomplished jazz trio weave their magic for me.
I couldn’t find a vid of exactly the three who played our night, but two out of three ain’t bad:
While below is a subsequent extract from Portrait Of A Woman including vocals:
Unusually, this was an afternoon, not an evening concert. It had a very geeky name for a very beautiful concert.
Technically speaking – geeky people took great pains to point out when we all celebrated the new millennium on 31 December 1999 – as there had not been a year zero – the real millennium must be 31 December 2000. The fact that calendars had changed, days added and all sorts was put to one side for those who wanted to celebrate the new millennium on 31 December 2000.
Janie and I just wanted to see this lovely concert and we were not disappointed. We were very keen on Florilegium and Emma Kirkby and the programme was enticing:
Here is a nice vid of James Galway with the Ventian Soloisti under Claudio Scimoni playing La Notte:
Here’s Maria Keohane singing Susser Trost – very Christmassy it sounds to me:
Here is the start of the Pergolesi Salve Regina performed by Florilegium, with Robin Blaze, not with Emma Kirkby. I love this album, which I think I bought at that time – possibly that very night.
Here’s a link to the whole album on YouTube Music.
Here’s Emma Kirkby singing Sweet Bird, with the Academy for Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood – then Music For A While.
Oh boy, can she sing.
I don’t think Florilegium and Emma Kirkby have ever recorded together, so you’ll just need to take our word for it that the combination for the real millennium was the real deal…
…or, as we put it in my log:
Super.
A lovely concert of fairly standard baroque fare, beautifully performed by Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante.
We heard:
There’s not much video of Europa Galante from that early period of their existence – but this one of them performing the delicious Vivaldi RV558 gives a good idea of what they looked and sounded like back then.
The inclusion of some WF Bach was a bit unusual. Biondi hasn’t recorded it and I’m not allowed to embed the linked vid, but you can click through to a video of some other Italian geezers performing it – here.
The Vivaldi RV157 also seems to be a bit rare – Biondi has not recorded it. It’ a very sweet piece. Here is the Iris Ensemble performing it.
If you are in search of the sound of Europa Galante with Fabio Biondi playing lots of Vivaldi of the Op 3 and Op 8 variety, then this playlist of mine on YouTube Music will be for you.
Alternatively, if the orchestral works of WF Bach float your boat, then this playlist is for you. I am pretty sure I bought the first album on that playlist on the back of hearing that sinfonia at The Wig that night.
No idea what Part One was about – presumably Part Two looked the more interesting concert to us or Part One was on a date we couldn’t do.
We heard:
The Tallis Scholars under the leadership of Peter Phillips are always terrific at this sort of stuff. Among the finest exponents of Josquin, The Tallis Scholars have recorded the lot.
Here’s a link to their recording of Josquin’s Missa Sine Nomine on YouTube Music.
Here’s a more recent example video:
Here’s a recording of them singing Heinrich Issac’s Tota Pulchra Es:
While here is a short excerpt from the Gombert Magnificat.
I’m pretty sure that I bought my copy of that CD, with all the Gombert Magnificats, at that concert. That’s a recording I return to quite often, as it is so good. Here’s a link to the whole thing on YouTube Music.
A splendid Thursday evening at The Wig.
To mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s demise, the Wigmore Hall treated us to a concert entirely comprising his music:
I don’t think the Purcell Quartet ever recorded The Art of Fugue. It does sound great in the string quartet format – here’s the Emerson Quartet’s recording:
The Purcell Quartet did record Bach trio sonatas around that time – the recording sounds great to my ears. I’ll be listening to all of these later – here’s a sample:
I cannot find Fretwork recordings of the pieces we heard that night, but this Netherlands Bach Society recording of “Trauerode” is rather lovely – albeit a larger orchestra than we heard at The Wig:
Here’s a recording of Nancy Argenta singing an aria from a different Bach cantata. It’s a rather yummy sound:
This concert will have been just the ticket for us after a busy week. No doubt one or both of us nodded off during some stage of the proceedings…in a good way.
This memory was triggered by this charming piece on the King Cricket website in late May 2020:
Janie (Daisy) and I weren’t there for the tense ending of that match either. But we were nearby – there in spirit if not in body.
We had been eagerly following the match all day.
But that day was also the birthday of Daisy’s mother, The Duchess of Castlebar. I had bought tickets for the three of us to see a Bach concert at the Wigmore Hall for that evening.
Janie had quite recently acquired a taste for chamber concert halls and baroque music, perhaps a year or two earlier. The Duchess tended to prefer large scale concerts of the Proms variety; we mostly booked those for her. But the Proms don’t get going until a bit later in the summer and it was the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death that year. So Bach at The Wig it was to be.
Anyway, that afternoon the Lord’s Test Match was beautifully poised and/but for reasons I cannot recall – had there been a lot of overnight rain? – the day’s play had been delayed and was playing out until quite late.
The Duchess is an avid follower of the cricket as well as a music aficionado. We called her to let her know that we were on the way to collect her. We could all listen to the ending of the cricket match together on the car radio on our way to The Wig.
As we drove to the Duchess’s residence, England wickets fell and the match seemed to be drifting in The West Indies direction. Daisy and I anticipated a dark mood and we were not disappointed.
Thrown it away, they’ve thrown it away…
…said The Duchess. We set off for Marylebone (the southern end thereof).
The Duchess explained to us, as she had several times before, that Denis (Compton), Ted (Dexter), Colin (Cowdrey) Ken (Barrington), Geoffrey (Boycott) and players of that ilk – whom she had met together with her late husband in the good old days- would not have thrown it away like this.
We arrived at The Wigmore Hall. England hadn’t lost a wicket for a while. Was it possible that they could snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat?
Daisy parked up – it was a warm sunny evening so we sat in the car with the roof open and the car radio on, listening to the denouement of the cricket match.
Try to imagine the scene, dear reader, as it must have looked to passing tourists who understand little or nothing about cricket. A distinguished-looking septuagenarian with her family sitting in a car leaping around in their seats, oohing and aahing every 45 seconds or so as the commentator spoke.
Then, those same seemingly dignified folk whooping with joy for a while, before sealing up the car and entering the Wigmore Hall. Tourists: meet the English.
Here’s a link to the scorecard and the Cricinfo bumf about the match.
Then the concert.
Basically it was an organ recital of JS Bach works by Jennifer Bate. When you click that preceding link you get some eye candy as well as the organist in question, as Jennifer Bate shares her name with a subsequent Miss England and sporting WAG.
It was a fine concert of mostly well-known Bach organ works. An example of one of the pieces (Bach after Vivaldi as it happens) can be seen and heard below.
To be precise, extracted from my log, we heard:
A sad coda to this Ogblog piece was the discovery that Jennifer Bate died in March 2020, just a few weeks before I wrote this piece.
Here’s another video of her playing one of the pieces we heard that night; Concerto in C BWV 595 (Ernst arr. Bach).
Below is the sort-of programme handed out on the night – it wouldn’t be an organ recital without an organ appeal, now would it?
A concert of Vivaldi pieces, performed by the Hanover Band, led by Richard Egarr.
A Thursday evening concert – both of us had pretty chock-full diaries in those days, but Janie and I both managed to limit our appointments to avoid late afternoon ones.
We heard:
Here’s at least a sample from each of the pieces we heard that night – sadly none by The Hanover Band who didn’t tend to record this stuff. The “In furore iustissimae irae” is worth the price of admission alone.
Crumbs, Janie and I went to the Wigmore Hall to see a lot of baroque concerts that season. Here’s another one we rated as:
superb.
Kontrabande were terrific. Had they been 1970s rock rather than 17th & 18th century baroque they might have been described as a supergroup. Dig this list of great names:
This is what they played that night:
I couldn’t find any YouTubes of Kontraband on-line, but the following one of Caldara sonatas and cantatas is very pleasing to the ear – I’d forgotten how much Caldara’s music pleased us that night:
A pair of baroque concerts over that weekend – Friday evening and Saturday evening. We chose to go and see both. It was part of a series named “Bach & His Contemporaries”.
I logged that Janie and I both described the concerts as:
superb.
On the Friday evening we saw/heard:
On the Saturday evening we heard:
Trevor Pinnock, Rachel Podger and some of the others recorded the Bach trio sonatas that year. I have put together a playlist on YouTube Music which includes those lovely sonatas and some other pieces from the January 2000 weekend – click here to listen to that playlist. Don’t be put off by the strike through on the link – anyone can hear the playlist but you will get adverts if you are not yourself a YouTube Music subscriber.
If you prefer to just click the odd embed, here is one of the Bach sonatas we heard Trevor and Rachel play:
I wasn’t familiar with the work of JCF Fischer. Here’s Trevor Pinnock playing Fischer’s passacaglia, not the chaconne we heard. Still lovely:
Here are some other people playing (part of) the Telemann Overture/Suite that we heard:
The Weiss piece was a delicious listen. Here is Evangelina Mascardi giving it a go.
We heard William Carter play the Weiss at that January 2000 concert, long before Janie’s “mystery punter” evening at the same venue:
Finally, here is a YouTube of the closing number from that brace of delicious concerts, with music so you can play along with it if you wish:
