Romantic music from the late 19th early 20th century. Not the sort of music that Daisy normally goes for, but there were several songs by Alma Mahler in this concert; as Daisy knows Marina Mahler, the granddaughter, Janie was interested enough to give it a try.
Actually, the simplicity of the solo voice and piano pleased Daisy; the whole concert was very relaxing. Even the Alban Berg, which I thought might be a bit impenetrable, wasn’t.
I really liked the Sibelius song they performed on encore – Var det en dröm? – which I don’t think I had ever heard before.
On Janie’s suggestion, we had taken a sneak peak at Massimo Dutti before we got to The Wig. I had some colourful shirts put aside for me to try on after the concert.
But once the performance had ended, we both had a bit of a hunger on, so went to the Wigmore Hall restaurant, just for some soup, to tide us over until evening. Butternut squash soup it was, very tasty.
If you look at the table behind us, I inadvertently caught the performers at lunch – Julius Drake glancing in our direction while talking to the woman to his left; Katarina Karnéus sitting to Julius Drake’s right
After soup, we legged it to Massimo Dutti where the young lady who had been serving us earlier was just about to give up on us and put the shirts away again. I bought four, which I shall always associate with this very enjoyable afternoon and concert.
I was keen to see this concert of young award-winning artistes, including two young guitarists, Jesse Flowers and Andrey Lebedev, who would be performing Elizabethan music. Actually, the Elizabethan theme included both Elizabethan periods – i.e. Tudor music and also music from the last 60 or so years.
Ian Pittaway gets really irritated when I mention Janie’s aversion to the lyrics of a certain type of Tudor secular song, which she describes as “Hey Nonie No” music.
Ian P points out, perhaps with some veracity, that there is only one Elizabethan song that actually contains the offending words, “Hey Nonie No”. Well, Ian ran out of road today, as the concert contained, amongst many other things, Thomas Morley’s It Was A Lover And His Lass, which certainly contains that line. I felt some of Janie’s finger nails digging into the back of my hand when we got to that bit.
But the Dowland songs were his usual darker stuff: In Darkness Let Me Dwell, Now O Now I Needs Must Part and Come Heavy Sleep, which Janie and I both tend to prefer both musically and lyrically.
Janie wondered why the words to these more substantial songs are not credited to their authors. I didn’t know the answer to that question but my guess is/was that they are words that had been handed down through oral tradition and that the first time they were published along with (e.g. Dowland’s) music, the authorship was lost in the mists of time. But at the time of writing I seek an authoritative view on this point.
Anyway, below is a more comprehensive list of the music played, taken from the programme.
Both of the guitarists played using modern, vertical fingers on the right hand rather than the horizontal finger technique Ian P is encouraging in me. I must say I thought the Tudor music sounded lovely on the modern guitar in the hands of both of these guitarists.
Janie and I also both enjoyed the modern-Elizabethan solo guitar pieces; Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland and Philip Houghton’s Ophelia…a Haunted Sonata. Let’s just say that we found the modern songs too difficult for us.
I had spotted sitting near to us one of my occasional real tennis pals from Lord’s, Michael, who I knew was an accomplished guitarist, as he had studied Benjy (my baritone ukulele/Tudor guitar) with great interest one time at Lord’s.
We chatted with Michael for a while during the interval, choosing not to bother with refreshments at that hour, before hunkering down for the short but more difficult second half of the concert.
Janie and I had never been to a Saturday lunchtime concert before and I’m not sure we’ll be returning on a Saturday lunchtime again in a hurry. It just doesn’t time well with our other regular activities, so it all felt like a bit of a rush, early in the weekend, getting to the Wig on time. Mind you, it is surprisingly easy enough to park around there on a Saturday lunchtime, we learnt…
…and we did very much enjoy the concert. Janie has decided to hedge her bets in the matter of the term “Hey Nonie No” music, by rebranding it as “Ring Around The Rosebuds” music. Very cunning.
Meanwhile I cannot find any examples of these youngsters playing Tudor music on-line, but here is a very young Jesse Flowers playing some Bach lute music transcribed for guitar, beautifully:
Highly recommended – we always enjoy Cardinall’s Musick concerts. We love their sound and we like the way that Andrew Carwood talks to the audience with a likeable mix of deep scholarship and folksy delivery.
Lots of unfamiliar pieces and even unfamiliar composers in there.
Here is a little vid of this group rehearsing and talking Byrd a few years ago:
https://youtu.be/8bMiYnzkZx4
I’m starting to get a bit fussy in my old age – perhaps because I am learning more about early music.
For example, it seemed to me that the Gregorian Chants interspersed in the Guerrero in the first half, were delivered (at least by the bass and tenor voices) in a staccato style when changing note within a word, quite contrary to the “smoothing” technique Ian Pittaway suggested to me. Patrick Craig, the countertenor, sang with that smoothing technique and it sounded cleaner to my ears. Janie thought the staccato was deliberate and fine.
I also found myself comedically irritated by a spelling mistake in the words for the Agnus Dei in the programme lyrics for that Guerrero mass…spelling that phrase Angus Dei at one point. It made me wonder whether there is a beef of God as well as a lamb of God.
But these are tiny points. The concert was a feast for the ears and just the calming experience I needed after a long day.
I particularly enjoyed the second half of the concert, with shorter pieces by Peter Philips, Philippe Verdelot, Adrian Willaert, Francisco Guerrero, Luca Marenzio, Daniel Torquet (“who he?” I hear you cry – Andrew Carwood is struggling to trace him too) and William Byrd taking the first 40-45 minutes of that second half.
There was a Christmassy encore by Hieronymus Praetorius – we were horrified to learn that, liturgically/technically speaking, we only reach the end of Christmas this weekend.
Still, we loved the concert and thoroughly recommend the broadcast to lovers of this type of music.
Clearly not. In my own defence, I thought that activity would have died down by the Saturday before Christmas. For us, work-wise, it had – but not for the shops and shoppers in neighbouring Oxford Street. Who knew?
In any case, I was very keen to see and hear this concert. Janie and I had very much enjoyed the Avital Meets Avital concert some eighteen months earlier:
So I was fascinated to see how Avi Avital got on with Baroque music and sort of glossed over the proximity to Christmas when I booked this Venice Baroque Orchestra concert.
Suffice it to say that the journey was suitably awful for Janie and me to agree, “never again at this time of year”…again. Yet, also again, the pain soon turned to pleasure when we listened to the music and watched the musicians.
Mostly Vivaldi, but we got to hear some Geminiani (of the Corelli variety) and one piece by a later Neapolitan composer, Giovanni Paisiello. Avi told a fruity anecdote about the difference between Venetians and the hyper-romantic Neapolitans.
Avi Avital also told an amusing anecdote from his early childhood about falling in love with the Winter concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, only to find out some years later that the piece he had actually fallen in love with was the Summer Concerto. Avi claims, it wasn’t until he went to Venice to work with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, that he actually experienced a violent summer thunder storm and realised why that stormy-sounding music represented summer rather than winter.
But the most interesting anecdote, which Avi told right at the end of the concert, was the fact that the concert very nearly didn’t happen at all. Most of the musicians were stranded as a result of the Gatwick Airport Drone Incident, which had required Avi’s team and the Wigmore Hall to work tirelessly rerouting musicians to enable the concert to go ahead. And we thought we’d had a stressful journey to that concert!
The orchestra are clearly seasoned exponents of this flavour of baroque music, although we felt that one or two members of the orchestra were not at their best that evening; perhaps travel or even life weary.
Avi Avital is an extraordinary, charismatic virtuoso of his instrument – his quality shines through all he plays. Yet, Janie and I both felt, some of the pieces that have been transposed from violin virtuoso pieces lose some of their musical quality through the transposition. Not for want of fine playing, but simply because the mandolin is a more limited, metal-stringed instrument. I enjoyed the change in some of the transposed pieces, but really missed the violin’s colour on others.
Below is a YouTube of a lovely, similar performance from a concert in Seoul a few week’s earlier:
But back to the here and now – this 2018 lunchtime concert. This is one of those BBC lunchtime jobbies, so we were in the extremely capable hands of Sara Mohr-Pietsch. Sara stewards these lunchtime concerts with such gentle, kind authority and efficiency, it makes one wonder whether she should be running the country. I suppose the country is a slightly tougher gig, but it could sure use some of the positive characteristics I have just described.
I have previously introduced Trio Mediæval as the Bananarama of mediaeval girl groups. Much like that 1980s pop trio, Trio Mediæval (a product of the 1990s as it happens) seems to have two stable members plus one newbie each time we see them.
The consistent pair are Anna Maria Friman (from Sweden) and Linn Andrea Fuglseth (from Norway), whereas the newbie this time was Jorunn Lovise Husan.
If Anna Maria and Linn Andrea were to pair up with a couple of Swedish blokes, I could start describing them as the Abba of mediaeval vocal music, which might be an even more marketing-friendly epithet. A thought for the girls to ponder, no doubt.
And thoughtful they are. They sing with smiles on their faces. They sing like people who absolutely know and love what they are doing. You sense that there is deep scholarship about mediaeval music in their work, yet also the willingness to adapt, experiment and make the music accessible to modern audiences.
This concert was a mixture of early English chants and motets, plus traditional folk songs from Norway and Sweden. It reads like an odd mix but actually worked very well. It has, each previous time, been a joy to attend their concerts and this one was certainly no exception.
Lulled into a blissful sense of security, Janie lulled me into a gentleman’s outfitters afterwards, helping me to spend far too much money upgrading my rather tired wardrobe. Anyone fancy some second hand jackets and trousers from the Bananarama and/or Abba era?
I can’t really explain why this concert didn’t really float our boat – it just didn’t. Janie and I were both feeling unusually tired that early evening – both short of energy for venturing out. We had been enjoying following the cricket and tennis over the weekend, the latter until reasonably late I suppose, but that wouldn’t normally put us off.
La Serenissima is an unusually large troupe for the Wigmore Hall – there as a lot of juggling and jiggling to fit everyone on the stage, so it all felt a bit busy.
The chorus missed their cue to enter right at the start of the performance, which led to more jiggling for stage space after the orchestra had prepared themselves spatially and tuned their instruments.
The concert was all music from the Imperial Court of Charles VI
I wanted to hear Caldara live as I had never heard any before. I rather liked his arias, actually. Quite beautiful.
But I knew the Conti comic opera material would not please Janie – nor did it much please me. In truth, the whole concert was a bit busy and noisy for us that night.
Come the interval, when we realised that the only substantially different piece on the schedule was a Vivaldi concerto, lovely though the RV171 undoubtedly is, we decided to make an early exit. Here is Europa Gallant’s delightful recording, with Fabio Biondi on the fiddle:
The following is La Serenissima playing Caldara, but a sinfonia, not an aria – beautiful it is, though:
…and finally here is a Caldara aria, performed by Concerto Köln under Emmanuelle Haïm with the superb Philippe Jaroussky singing the aria.
Still, that Friday I had an abstemious day at Lord’s, with a view to having dinner with Daisy and then going to the concert. Daisy indeed came over to my place for a Four Seasons dinner, but then decided that the whole idea of going to a late night concert and then rising for a crack of dawn picnic preparation was too much, so she returned to Noddyland and let me go to this concert on my own.
Probably just as well – she’d have absolutely hated it.
The rubric had inferred a folk/jazz interpretation of Schubert’s songs…which in a sense it was, but it felt a bit gimmicky, at times verging on naff. The tuba/trombone giving the music an Oom-pah-pah band sound…
…if I mention the song where the leader, Bryan Benner, got us to yodel along with him…
…you’re probably getting the gist.
There was a small claque of Erlkings fans sitting behind, but the front row mafia, comprising Wigmore Hall regulars, seemed a little stunned by the style.
The idea is laudable and I even enjoyed some of the tracks. The song which Bryan Benner sang unplugged on the guitar, for example, had a lovely sound to it transposed from piano to guitar. His translations of lyrics generally worked well and he has an outstanding baritone voice. The voice was somewhat wasted with most of the louder arrangements.
Below is one of the songs they performed on the night, with a relatively minimal arrangement:
Below is their signature song, the arrangement of which I thought overpowered Bryan Benner’s powerful voice:
…and here is one from their latest album/project:
At the end of the gig Bryan said an emotional goodbye to Gabriel, the brass instrumentalist, who is leaving the band and for whom the Wigmore Hall was a final gig.
It all felt a bit “ego project” to me, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood.
I don’t think I’d knowingly heard any William Lawes before – certainly not his viol music.
He looks like a quintessential cavalier of the period, which sums up his career and untimely death (reportedly “casually shot”) soon after entering the theatre of war for the first and last time.
There’s not a lot of Lawes viol music played by Phantasm to be found on the web, but here is the paven from the consort set in F, which we heard on the evening:
…we didn’t have the organ accompaniment, but we did have a sixth viol player in the second half for those pieces that demand six viols.
Likewise, I was not familiar with the work John Jenkins – his viol music was a little lighter in tone, although all such viol consort music is, by its nature, pretty moody.
Even harder to find on line, here are some other dudes playing a John Jenkins Fantasy a6 other than the ones we heard. You’ll get the idea and it is still lovely:
Something about this sort of music heard live touches the soul – I think it is the close proximity to the vibrations of all of those viols.
We both felt so calm and tranquil after the concert we could hardly get our act together to eat when we got home, but somehow we managed it. A very pleasurable end to a Monday off work.
…in which Hille Perl makes a cameo appearance as the viola da gamba and sexting interest…
…it really isn’t often you’ll see those two terms – viola da gamba and sexting – in the same sentence.
Then, recently, DJ kindly bought me an electric ukulele in the style of an oil can:
…inducing me to comment to Ian Pittaway, after my last baroq-ulele lesson, that I now no longer know whether I seek to emulate Lee Santana or Carlos Santana.
Anyway, Janie and I were very excited that we would be seeing this remarkable couple, Hille Perl and Lee Santana, playing at the Wigmore Hall.
After such a build up and such high expectations, it wouldn’t be surprising if the concert turned out to be a disappointment, especially as we needed to brave unseasonably awful weather to get to The Wig. But no such thing – we were truly entranced by the music and their performance as a couple. It really was a beautiful concert from start to finish.
We found their style of remaining on stage throughout and looking so captivated by each other’s music making was quite touching. In particular, when Lee Santana played a few solo pieces on a slightly smaller theorbo; a “théorbe des pièces” to be precise, Hille Perl looked transfixed. As were we – what a sweet sound that solo instrument version of the theorbo had – I don’t think we’d ever heard one of those before.
Hille Perl and Lee Santana concluded the concert with Les Folies d’Espagne by Marin Marais, which is the very piece that Hille Perl plays solo in the movie Happy End. If you want to see what Hille Perl and Lee Santana look like playing together, here is a little embedded vid of them playing that very piece together:
They played us an encore on the afternoon which was unexpected and unannounced. I’m pretty sure it was O’Carolan’s Dream, which you can see/hear them play on this embedded vid:
The afternoon was an absolute treat; a super way to enjoy a Monday off work!
This was a lovely concert of English viol music, specifically William Byrd, from the late Tudor/early Jacobean period. Phantasm are seriously good at this stuff.
Janie was up for this one. Wigmore Hall – warmer, much warmer. Byrd too.
An evening of early music with my ByrdFunnily enough, come the interval I realise that, sitting behind me, was the very couple I sat next to at the Ancient Montreal concert the previous week, with whom I had swapped stories about the cold…
…we all agreed that the Wigmore Hall is much warmer. There’s something warm about Phantasm too. They come across as a very mellow, gentle ensemble. Laurence Dreyfuss always explains things and reads things out as if he is sitting in your private parlour having a comfy chat.
Anyway the music was very soothing and relaxing, although it didn’t quite manage to do the de-stressing job on us that particular Tuesday night, while we were both having “a bit of a week”. That is the thing about Tuesday evening concerts.
That’s not Phantasm’s fault, nor the Wigmore Hall’s I do realise.
