Wonderful music bravely performed, shame about the venue

"Call centre ‘hold' music'
This was the warning about the music of Antonio Vivaldi (1678 – 1741) we were given by a friend when we called in on our way to the Bailrigg to see this concert of Baroque Music (for the programme, click here). In a way she was right for, beside the generally-acknowledged giants of the era, Handel and Bach, Vivaldi is at the top of the second rank rather than in the ‘first team' of the eighteenth century.

This is in part because, just as with Handel's annually-recycled Messiah, there is much, much more to the red-haired and reverend Venetian Vivaldi's output than the wearyingly-ubiquitous Four Seasons. Bach, notably, respected the work of his Italian contemporary, and made skilful arrangements of his music. This is actually a serious compliment, as copyright is a relatively recent phenomenon.

The Venetian Lido comes to Lancashire
Vivaldi also wrote a great deal of sacred music, opera and chamber music, and it was but a small selection of this latter we heard at this concert. One piece on the programme, a violin sonata, exists in a single, unique manuscript (thought to have been penned by the composer's father) at the Public Library in Manchester.

The other composer whose works made up this evening of chamber music was a serially prolific, North German contemporary of Vivaldi, Bach and Handel (and friends with both of the latter), the long-lived Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 – 1767). He too composed prolifically, and the jokes about setting the laundry list to music do spring to mind.

But that is unkind and, like Vivaldi, he penned some genuinely and deeply moving music. It is unfortunate and very wrong that, like Vivaldi, much of his output is so seldom performed. So the more Teutonic Telemann chamber works well complemented the Mediterranean textures of Vivaldi. This delightful admixture all sounds fine on paper, but …

Chamber concert in symphonic setting
.. sounds, alas, is the word which caused me so many reservations with this concert. The Great Hall at the University is eminently suited to larger-scale performances (see my review of the Northern Chamber Orchestra and the Lancaster singers), but the delicate textures of the intimate ‘Kammermusik', or chamber pieces, were lost in the unhelpful acoustic.

This was, however, was no fault of the seven members of the band, the excellent English Concert, who worked hard, occasionally too hard, to achieve a reasonable balance of sound.

Authentic delicacy
But what made it worse was the fact that The English Concert is a, ‘authentic', or ‘period' band. They play either on original instruments (director Andrew Manze's violin and the basso continuo's cello were both eighteenth century originals) or on modern replicas.

Further, such bands extend their fidelity to the sound, the practise and the ethos of the first performances of the music. Thus their phrasing, bowing, articulation are different from, say, the sounds produced by the Halle or the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras.

All this means that the intimate, ‘house music' finely-textured qualities of the music just did not come across clearly or with definition. It was like playing (unamplified) a string quartet in the cavernous space of the Albert Hall.

The concert would have sounded so much better in a smaller auditorium, say that of St John's Church in Lancaster. And maybe a more central venue would have attracted a bigger – and younger – audience.

On this occasion, even your not-so-young correspondent felt young (and anyway, we classically good-looking people don't watch the clock, do we? - ed), though there was a small but welcome and totally appropriate presence of young students. With Classic FM and ‘crossover', classical music now unfailingly attracts a younger audience than its ‘élitisit' image sometimes belies.

I am particularly concerned that orchestras and performers of global stature – like the English Concert - should be more widely accessible to young people in these parts.

Yet, despite all these reservations, the sheer beauty and varied delight of the actual music – most of it rarely performed - nevertheless still came across.

Copyright © 13 March 2005 Michael Nunn