Apollo’s Cabinet. Lakeside, Nottingham. 13 March 2025, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Lakeside

Apollo’s Cabinet.  Lakeside,  Nottingham, 13 March 2025,

5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

“An evening of musical delights from the court of King Frederick the Great.”

It’s not every day you get invited to a royal birthday party, especially when the royal happens to be Frederick the Great of Prussia, celebrating his 46th birthday in 1758.  This generous invitation opening Thursday’s concert given by the early music group Apollo’s Cabinet.  And a lot of fun it was too.

King Frederick wasn’t any old monarch.  He was obsessed by music – and flute music in particular.  This didn’t go down at all well as far as his father was concerned.  In fact, his father forbade his son from indulging his musical passions…which only made them stronger.  So early music lessons had to be done in private, causing Frederick’s teacher, the celebrated flautist Johann Joachim Quantz, to hide in wardrobes to avoid being discovered.

It was a very jolly idea for Apollo’s Cabinet to assemble the sort of music with which Frederick might have celebrated his birthday.  Frederick liked the company of musicians and loved to play his flute with them.  Of course, everybody had to be very polite and appreciative of his playing – all except for Quantz who famously was the one person allowed to correct his master…and who seemed to relish this freedom very much.

Thursday’s programme was full of fun and good fellowship.  The enthusiasm and enjoyment of the six performers were infectious and it was impossible not to swept along by the sheer joy of making music amongst friends.  Amongst the composers featured were Telemann (a special favourite of Frederick’s) as well as Quantz (of course) and other court composers such as Johann Gottlieb Graun and Johann Adolph Hasse. 

J.S. Bach was featured too: not surprisingly as the great man had visited Frederick’s palace of Sanssouci in 1747.  The product of this meeting was The Musical Offering, which Bach composed and sent to the king after having been called upon to write music based on a theme devised by the king himself.  Bach did much more than this, producing for Frederick all sorts of musical riddles and other challenges which he knew that the monarch would enjoy solving.  Apollo’s Cabinet played two canons as examples, both mindboggling in their ingenuity.

A gentler side of Bach was on display in Sheep May Safely Graze – which came a brief respite in between much that was astonishingly virtuosic.  Hasse’s Cantata per Flauto was a Technicolor piece of musical pyrotechnics – but so was most of the programme, especially the exhilarating Concerto (by Graun) for Recorder and Violin which ended the first half and the dazzling Concerto for Flute and Recorder (by Telemann) that ended the second. 

The six players who make up Apollo’s Cabinet are versatile, have very nimble fingers and clearly love what they do.  The two recorder players switch effortlessly between a vast assortment of instruments and communicating telepathically (or so it would seem) between themselves and their colleagues.  They still had enough breath to play two very jolly encores in response to loud applause from an audience that would have been more than happy to hear them play all night.

Apollo’s Cabinet

Thomas Pickering – harpsichord, flute, recorder.  David Lopez Ibanez – violin.

Harry Buckoke – viola da gamba.  Teresa Wrann – recorder.

Jonatan Bougt – theorbo, Baroque guitar.  Jonny Akerman – percussion.