This was an excellent concert. Janie and I are both partial to the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and are also partial to a bit of Corelli. So we weren’t going to miss out on this one.
The concert was actually Corelli plus – it also highlighted some composers directly influenced by the great man.
Below is a YouTube of the Alte Musik Berlin mob playing one of the Platti concerti we heard…
…followed by a real treat – the Corelli Op 5 No 10 (recorder concerto) shown live from the concert the night before ours, at the Kablow Dorfkirche – absolutely dreamy:
In the four years inbetween, Esfahani had become a real name in the early music world and here was an opportunity for us to see a recital of interesting stuff at very close quarters.
All Byrd in the first half – absolutely enchanting. The second half captivated us a little less – mostly familiar material from Bach’s Musical Offering (played beautifully) – we didn’t really see how the Ligeti fitted in with the Byrd and Bach. We love Hungarian folk music; the style just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the programme, which was so relaxing. But that’s just us.
You don’t get to hear Telemann’s Tafelmusik in the concert hall all that often, although we had seen The Academy For Ancient Music perform some, also at The Wig, only six months earlier – click here or below:
The attraction of this Florilegium concert was partly the Tafelmusik (we were to hear some highlights from Part One whereas we’d heard Part Two last time…
It was a very enjoyable concert. Florilegium are always top notch – or rather they always have been when we’ve seen them.
The Easter Oratorio is a super choice for Florilegium, with their core strength being woodwind. I recall they also drummed up some fairly splendid trumpets for the occasion too. The singing soloists had beautiful voices.
Below is a vid of the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists under John Elliot Gardiner performing the piece. Larger scale, but a lovely vid and it will certainly give you an idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ICH1gK5fQ
I remember Janie remarking that the concert was just what the doctor should have ordered…
…at that stage of Janie’s “resurrection” that was a multi-layered joke, together with being a truthful reflection on what a tonic the concert had been.
This was the start of Joshua Redman’s tenure as curator of Wigmore Hall’s jazz.
I recall that we were very excited about seeing this one and yet a little disappointed with the concert in the end. We love the sound of sax, but there was something about four saxophones and nothing else that lacked colour for this jazz, to us anyway.
You don’t have to be a Telemaniac (nor a Beliber) to have enjoyed this concert …but it helps.
We absolutely loved it, but then we are lovers of Baroque music by the likes of Telemann and Biber.
Further, we were treated to some early Baroque by Schein and Simpson, to whet our appetites and to show us how table music emerged as a genre in the 17th century.
Below is a short vid that shows the AAM under Richard Egarr rehearsing a Telemann concerto – one of my favourites as it happens:
Below is a nice selection of Telemann Tafelmusik – but not by AAM:
Finally, for those unfamiliar with Thomas Simpson (as we were) who would like to hear a small sample – below a little woodwind sampler, provenance unknown beyond the YouTube details provided:
We treated the Mainelli family to this concert. Xenia was learning the harp at school at that time.
In any case, it looked like a lovely concert, which indeed it was.
Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall resource for this concert. For some reason the on-line resource says that the first piece was a Handel arrangement – I’m pretty sure it was the Concerto in D minor by Allesandro Marcello, as stated in the programme.
We met and ate in the Wigmore Hall restaurant before the performance – I think possibly taking desert/coffee/drinks at our table during the interval as well.
To get a feel for what this concert sounded like, here is a video of Xavier de Maistre performing Recuerdos de la Alhambra, by Francisco Tárrega, which I recall was a bit of a highlight at our concert.
I think everyone in our party had a jolly good time – the eating, drinking, chatting and of course the music.
This seemed like a wonderful idea – improvised music to please lovers of jazz and contemporary music, after the Evelyn Glennie concert, in the bar/restaurant.
It didn’t attract much of a crowd if I remember correctly.
We enjoyed our cold compilations and some wine…
…more than we enjoyed the music, which we found surprisingly bland – not jazzy in the way we thought it might be.
We’re all for the Wigmore Hall experimenting and the late night format is one of the more interesting experiments, although they are still struggling to find a formula that works.
But we have booked two more Wigmore Lates this year (as I write in 2018), both of which look right up our street, so we really hope the idea will find its feet eventually.
Anyway, below is the running order for the concert we heard on 22 June 2012:
In truth, not all of the music pleased us, but most of it did and it was fascinating to watch Evelyn Glennie play so many different percussive instruments at such close quarters.
Here is a little vid of her playing the Vivaldi Concerto she played us that night – albeit from a different occasion and with a bit more of an ensemble in the vid:
We also booked the late night concert the same night – I seem to recall we arranged for a rather tasty platter of cold compilations at The Wig between the gigs. Yum.
The late night concert, which was served up in the restaurant, was less to our taste – click here or below – but never mind:
But actually I was brought up with some early Baroque madrigals ringing in my ears – a reel-to-reel recording, made by my father, from the radio, of Monteverdi’s Madrigals of Love and War.
The extraordinary BBC genome Project allows me to find the concert in question so easily it is almost embarrassingly easy – it was broadcast on 4 June 1974 at 21:50 – click here. I wouldn’t have heard the recording on that day – clearly, but dad probably played it to me pretty soon afterwards and I remember listening to it a lot that summer. The concert had originally taken place in October 1973 – a few weeks after I started secondary school.
But I digress…
…except to say that I had never heard any Madrigals of Love and War live and was keen to hear some – hence my particular desire to book this concert.
Thursday evening is not (and in those days certainly was not) Janie’s favourite night to go to a concert. Nor is Monteverdi one of her favourites.
This concert conformed Janie’s view that Monteverdi is not really for her. All too noisy and the male singing is a bit shouty, she claims. I sort-of know what she means, without agreeing with the conclusion.
Janie did enjoy some of the instrumental music, though…
…here is a vid of some other folk playing the opening number we heard that evening – Falconieri’s lovely Ciaconna in G major:
