Kino Teatr, Sunday 20 October 2019

The final performance in this year’s festival came from the Consone Quartet, returning after their involvement in the fine Bach evening which opened the festival. They are BBC New Generation Artists for the 2019-21 season and are the only period-instrument string quartet ever to have been accepted into the scheme.

Their programme bridged the period between Boccherini and Schumann, demonstrating with great clarity and beauty the development of the quartet over that time span. They opened with Schubert’s early String Quartet in C D32, with its fresh intensity and exuberant sense of vitality. This was followed by Haydn’s early quartet Op20 No4. The richness of tone in the opening movement was an indication of the particular warmth of gut strings, and this continued to be marked for the rest of the quartet, even in the skittish final movement.

After the interval we heard Boccherini’s brief quartet Op33 No5, which only extends to two movements but has fine changes of dynamic intensity and liveliness. The final work was Schumann’s quartet No2 Op41. Here we are on the verge of modern instrumentation but there was good reason to set it within the context of the earlier works and on original instruments, for it rapidly becomes clear that Schumann is hearing the instruments quite differently to the way we do today and thus the expectations of the listener are quite different. It was equally clear that the acoustic in the Kino Teatr was an essential part of the experience and one which helped both the ambience and intimacy of the event. This young quartet has made a very strong impression in a very short time and looks (and sounds!) certain to continue to be highly successful.

The festival was over all too soon. Next year is the big Beethoven anniversary and promises to be equally enthralling.

I Fagiolini – Shaping the Invisible

St Mary in the Castle, 18 October 2019

I first came across I Fagiolini at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in 1997 where they were singing with the Sdasa Chorale. I recall it well and still have the CD they issued at the time. Since then the group, which originated in Oxford, have had many changes of personnel but Robert Hollingworth is still very much the guiding light for the ensemble and tenor Nicholas Hurndall Smith is still with them.

Shaping the Invisible, which they are currently touring, is a departure from the conventional concert as it is based around the creative life of Leonardo da Vinci, with Professor Martin Kemp introducing the large scale projections of paintings and drawings, before Robert Hollingworth provides the links to what we are about the hear. Most of the time these links make very good sense, with some very beautiful liturgical settings by Tallis, Josquin and Victoria. There are also some surprising comic elements with Janequin’s La Guerre and Vecchi’s Daspuoche stabilao. Modern items sneak in from Howells and Rubbra, and the rich harmonies of Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s La Voix du Bien-Aime where religious intensity verges on the erotic.

All of this flowed effortlessly and with consummate artistry from all concerned. It was a pity that the final musical setting by Adrian Williams was so stylistically divorced from the rest of the programme. Where virtually all that we had heard required close harmony and beauty of line, Williams fragmented ideas, spoken passages and unstructured narrative seemed a strange place to leave us. As Robert Hollingworth had a slight throat problem the encore was dropped and this might have cheered us up again but by now it was too late and a fine evening left a slightly bitter taste.

I Fagiolini run workshops today (Saturday) and the final event in this year’s HEMF is at the Kino Teatr Sunday afternoon with the Consone Quartet at 3.00pm.

17 – 20 October 2019

You can tell when a Festival has come of age when a wet and blustery Friday morning can draw substantial numbers of people to a solo Bach keyboard concert. In a very short time, Hastings Early Music Festival has established itself not only for the quality of the performers – many of them internationally recognised in their field and actively followed at live events – but for the level of audience enthusiasm which the events have raised. Not very long ago I would have had to travel to Brighton, Bath or Buxton to encounter so much early music within such a short time. Yet here we are, in St Mary in the Castle, on a Friday morning to hear Jan Rautio playing Bach.

He opens with BWV 974, the D minor concerto based on Alessandro Marcello. However he is playing a modern Steinway – about as far removed in tone as one could imagine from Bach’s own time, and distinctly different from the original instruments the night before. This itself is tellingly important, for much of the playing seems to look forward rather than backward. The sensitivity of touch on the modern piano, unlike either the organ or harpsichord which Bach and Vivaldi wrote for, allows gradations of tone and volume, of rubato and texture quite impossible on the earlier instruments. As such the slow movement of the Marcello takes on a far more romantic, almost Mozartian feel, and the final movement of the arrangement of BWV593 seems to pre-echo the intensity, if not the magisterial impact, of Beethoven. Between these two we heard the F major Italian concerto BWV971 which impressed with its sense of authority and drive. It could easily have gone on much longer.

The concert mirrored that which we had heard the night before given by the HEMF Baroque Ensemble, made up entirely of original instruments and tuning. Maintaining the egalitarian feel of the ensemble, there was no sense that it was being driven by a despotic conductor as each of the six works was led and introduced by different soloists. We opened on familiar ground with Bach’s 3^rd Brandenburg concerto, through the less familiar Harpsichord concerto BWV1056, to Vivaldi’s virile Double Cello Concerto RV531. One of the most pleasing aspects of the evening was the way in which, stood most of the time in a gentle curve, the musical development could be experienced physically as ideas were passed from one player to another along the line and back again. Similarly, the twelve players were equally important to the whole; there was never any sense of a soloist pitted against a supportive body – even in Telemann’s fine Viola Concerto TWV51, which was the only work to come close to a model of the concerto we would come to recognise in the nineteenth century. It was an object lesson in sensitivity and response.

The evening ended with a glorious performance of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, the second movement as sublime as I can recall it, with never a hint of sentimentality which modern instruments can all too easily bring to it.

This brought us half way through the four main concerts. This evening I Fagiolini at St Mary’s and then the String Quartet concert to round off the weekend at the Kino on Sunday afternoon.