CBSO Centre Stage: Baroque Ensemble, 01 March 2024, The CBSO Centre, Birmingham. 4✩✩✩✩ Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.
CBSO Centre Stage: Baroque Ensemble, 01 March 2024, The CBSO Centre, Birmingham.
4✩✩✩✩ Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.
“An intimate and engaging hour of informal but exquisite music making.”
JC Bach – Quartet
Avison – Trio Sonata Op1 No. 2
Handel – Harp Concerto in B Flat, Op 4
There is an attractive intimacy and informality about the CBSO’s Centre Stage Concerts. The fact that often, as was the case here, you do not even know what you are going to hear until you get to the venue adds to the feeling of spontaneity. This is a chance for players from the orchestra to explore their pet, sometimes quite niche, passions and to guide us down some less familiar musical byways. This element of the unexpected brings with it something of the feel of a ‘happening’ rather than a concert or recital.
This concert gave us a blend of the familiar and the less so. J. C. Bach is more familiar now than he once was. We have the early music revival to thank for this. His Quartet for violins, ‘cello and harp is a playful work, and characteristic of the suavity and elegance we associate with the “Style Gallant”. The players gave a clean, uncluttered reading, full of good humour. The thinner tone produced by gut strings - and mostly an absence of vibrato - can expose tuning issues, and to start with, there were some here. However, as the ensemble settled, these disappeared.
One cannot help but feel that were Charles Avison called Carlo Avisonni – and hailed from Napoli rather than Newcastle - he and his music might be much more well known. His Trio Sonata is a rich and weighty piece, characterised by long lyrical lines and complex counterpoint, which the players explored with intelligence and attentiveness. A revelation: let us have more Mr Avison (pictured) please!
Handel wrote two concerti for inclusion in his secular oratorio, Alexander’s Feast. The harp in the first of these represents Alexander’s Lyre player, Timotheus, whose music has the power to rouse all manner of passions: ‘Timoteus, raised on hight amid the tuneful choir, with flying fingers touched the lyre’ are the words to introduce the concerto and, my word, harpist Katherine Thomes’ fingers certainly lived up to this billing! Lengthy solo passages of beauty & virtuosity gave display to impressive technique and innate musicality. But if the harpist shone; it was as first among equals. All of the players were individually impressive and the interplay between solo and ritornello passages was easy and conversational.
A thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Katherine Thomas – Triple Harp
Julia Aberg – Baroque Violin
Kelly McCucker – Baroque Violin
Jacqueline Tyler – Baroque ‘Cello
Warwick Cole - Harpsichord