Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea
Royal Academy Opera
Shoreditch Town Hall. 21 May 2016
Awaiting the construction of their new concert hall, the Royal Academy of Music have been trying out different venues in the past year. For their final opera of the season, Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, they chose Shoreditch Town Hall (a space new to me) in the middle of a very lively and cosmopolitan part of London. There was some awkwardness in the staging arrangement as the audience enter past what would normally be back-stage, but they coped with this well. The staging was simple, a three-sided box with three entrances on either side, and five in the rear wall. There were very few props, with much depending on Jake Wiltshire’s excellent lighting to provide mood, most prominently at the end of Act 1 when Seneca’s death is depicting by a flood of red light.
Poppea is one of the more complex operas to stage, with many characters and a myriad of interconnections between the roles. Continue reading
The weekend traditionally opens on Friday evening with the famous Regensburg cathedral boys’ choir, the Regensburger Domspatzen, 
The London Festival of Baroque is growing from strength to strength after its rebirth from its previous incarnation as the Lufthansa Festival. Shorn of the former funding stream, it has had to rebuild its financial stability. The increase in the number of this year’s events over last year is one sign of their success. One of the big advantages of the former sponsorship deal was that it enabled many non-UK groups to travel to London for the festival, so it is encouraging that such visits by musicians from abroad continue to be a feature of the festival. Also most encouraging is their focus on young musicians, with three concerts specifically devoted to them under the banner of ‘Future Baroque’. They also included a late-night concert by the young folk-inspired singer-songwriter, Olivia Chaney.
If the composers aren’t familiar to you, some of the melodies will be in this selection of 19th century guitar pieces inspired by Scotland during the early Romantic era. Scotland was an influence to many artists and musicians of that period, famously Mendelssohn after the 1829 visit that produced the Scottish Symphony, Hebrides Overture and Fingal’s Cave. Giuliani Mauro is given most coverage, with six simple pieces, some of which are enlarged into a larger format by combining, repeating, and adding a prelude. Fellow Italian Lauigi Legnani has the most extended and elaborate pieces with his two variation sets on themes from Rossini’s opera La donna del lage, based on Sir Walter Scott’s poem on James V of Scotland. 
Andrew Benson-Wilson plays the famous 1723 Hildebrandt organ in Störmthal, Leipzig (where Bach gave the opening recital), on Wednesday 15 June 2016 at 7pm, during the Leipzig Bachfest.
Hindorõdin hindodre (One of the Cragich),
Johannes Pramsohler and his three fellow musicians of Ensemble Diderot relished the contrast between and within the various pieces, playing with an exquisite combination of consort and individuality. Their intonation was perfect throughout, and they managed to bring exaggeration to the already exciting music without ever pushing things too far. I particularly liked the fact that, despite having a clear group leader, his playing never dominated. These were true Trio Sonatas, where the balance between the three voices is vital – and Roldán Bernabé and Gulrim Choi had important contributions on second violin and cello. Philippe Grisvard’s harpsichord continue was delicate and sensitive, correctly avoiding the temptation to do too much.
About ten years after Reinhard Goebel’s Musica Antiqua Köln disbanded, Ensemble Diderot have completed their last CD project by recording the remaining six Trio Sonatas from his Il giardino del piacere, overo Raccolta de diversi fiori musicali, come sonate, fughe, imitationi, ciaccone, passagaglie, allemande, correnti &c. We know little of Johann Friedrich Meister. He seems to have come from Hanover, and certainly worked in the Ducal Court there. After a dispute about pay, he moved to the Lübeck area before moving north to Flensburg in Schleswig (then part of Denmark and now the most northerly city in Germany) where he was organist of the Marienkirche and work for the local Ducal Court. His collection, Il giardino del piacere (pleasure garden), was published in Hamburg in 1695, shortly before his death.
The untimely death in August 2015 of the eminent organist and choral director John Scott was a shock to many. Organist and Director of Music of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1990 to 2004, and then at St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, New York, John’s reputation as solo organist and choir director seemed to be on a perpetual rise. His memory remains strong in St Paul’s Cathedral, as was evident from the packed Service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving to mark his life, held in place of the usual Evensong on Friday 6 May.
This is the penultimate recording in The Cardinal’s Musick’s Tallis Edition, and it opens with a masterpiece, the two settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. As Andrew Carwood explains in his programme notes, it seems that they were written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, rather than the earlier Catholic Queen Mary. It is not clear why these, and other similar Lamentations, were composed or when they would have been performed, if not in the Holy Week Tenebrae service in the Catholic rite – hence the usual assumption of composition during Queen Mary’s reign. They are remarkable pieces, using the simple textural style of one note per syllable encouraged by Archbishop Cranmer. The Hebrew incipits are particularly well set, as are the concluding, and rather sombre 
Telemann taught himself to play the recorder, violin and zither before the age of 10, and continued to practice the recorder well into his teens – something very few youngsters do today. He seems to have retained a love for the recorder, judging by the number of pieces he wrote for it, including these Suites and Concertos. Incidentally, the two Suites are both titled Ouverture in their manuscripts, and are examples of Telemann’s so-called concert en ouverture style of composition, which combines elements of the traditional suite with the overture. Apart from the E-flat suite (which is intended for the flute pastorelle, which perhaps means the panpipes), all the music is from the same manuscript surviving in the Hesse Court library in Darmstadt, suggesting that they were composed for Michael Böhm, Telemann’s brother-in-law and a virtuoso woodwind player. They are all written for alto recorder.
It is when you hear music from composers like Niccolò Jommelli (1714-74) that you realise just how deep the musical well is, if you peep behind the wall of well-known composers. Writing in that fascinating limbo period between the Baroque and Classical era, Jommelli perhaps completed too many operas for posterity to master. Il Vologeso is one of his best-known works and, on the strength of this performance by Classical Opera Company (giving the UK premiere), deserves to be heard more, and in a full staging rather than this concert performance. This was another part of their MOZART 250 project, aimed at exploring the works of Mozart and his contemporaries on the anniversary of their composition – which, in the case of Il Vologeso, was on 11 February 1766, in the enormous theatre at the Duke of Württemberg’s Ludwigsburg Palace near Stuttgart.
The evening started, slightly unfortunately, with the Tragic Overture of Brahms, the bête noire of Bruckner and Hans Rott (pictured), and several others of a progressive ilk, such as Mahler. Unfortunate, because of the effect that Brahms’ withering comments on Hans Rott’s First Symphony had on the young composer. The unfortunate Rott (1858-84) was a student contemporary of Mahler and Hugo Wolf at the Vienna Conservatory, and studied organ with Bruckner, who saw him as his ‘favourite pupil’. Although Rott hadn’t impressed a conservatory competition panel with a piano reduction of the first movement, he went on to expand it into a four movement symphony. For reasons unknown, and certainly ill-advised, the then 22 year-old Rott showed the score to Brahms, an enemy of anything musically progressive, and of Bruckner and the Vienna conservatory. Brahms advised the already vulnerable young man to ‘give up composing’, leading to a possibly hallucinatory incident that resulted in him being committed 
Matthias Weckmann
In the last two years of his life, Monteverdi collected a substantial amount of his music for publication (the Madrigali guerrieri et amorisi, 1638, and Salve morale et spirituale, 1641), reflecting his musical output over the previous decades. After his death, one of his publishers had the good sense, or the commercial sense, to put together some unpublished manuscripts to form the 1650 Messa a 4 v. et salmi a 1–8 v. e parte da cappella & con le litanie della B.V. This is the first of two CDs from The Sixteen of music from this posthumous collection: the Mass setting of the title will be on the second volume. This CD includes a selection of liturgical pieces, but not in any specific liturgical context, with several Vespers Psalms, a Litany to the Virgin Mary and a Magnificat by Cavalli who probably assisted in the preparation of the publication. 
performance was that the trumpets were not only valveless, but also had no finger holes to assist in the tuning of notes. These finger holes (or ‘venting’ or ‘nodal’ holes) are in any case a relatively recent innovation, and may not have been used in early natural trumpets, at least not for the purpose to which they are now used; to make the tuning of the higher harmonic notes easier. Indeed, it seems that the original holes found in some instruments were actually place at the anti-node, rather than the node, and were therefore intended to silence the tricky notes altogether, rather than to try to bring them into tune.
Following her first CD, Upon a Ground (reviewed 
The medieval cult of saintly relics has left us with some glorious examples of art, architecture, literature and music. But the studies of historians generally focus on one of first three of these aspects in isolation. This book aims to redress the balance by focussing on the musical aspects but within the context of the rich story of politics, power and influence, the complex history of monasticism and liturgy, and the artistic outpouring that the devotion to relics generated. It covers the period from around the mid-eighth century to the thirteenth in Tuscany. It is an extension of a Yale PhD thesis by musicologist Benjamin Brand.
The UK seems to breed small-scale a capella male choral groups. The aptly named Queen’s Six are one of a particular branch of that breed, with their matching suits and shirts (and, it seems, overcoats) and carefully posed publicity photographs. They are half of the contingent of lay clerks (adult choir singers) at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, an official residence of the Queen as well as her private weekend home. Living within the castle walls, and performing eight or more services a week in the Royal Chapel; the six male singer’s vocal credentials couldn’t be greater. They were formed in 2008 on the 450th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth I, 
A number of churches are accepting the inevitable reduction in congregations and opening their buildings to wider community use. Heath Street Baptist Church, prominently positioned in the middle of Hampstead, is one such, reducing their services to Sunday mornings, but enabling a wide variety of activities during the rest of the week, including frequent lunchtime and evening concerts and, on this occasion, a complete weekend devoted to the ‘Hampstead Baroque Festival’. After four earlier events of English, Italian and French music, all accompanied by food, the weekend concluded with a Sunday evening concert devoted to ‘Bratwurst, Beer & Bach’, given by the newly-formed group L’Istante (not, incidentally, the only early music group to adopt that name *and now renamed as Isante) directed by harpsichordist/conductor Pawel Siwzak.
Overtures by: Nicolai, Spohr, Bach, Handel, Verdi, Weber, Tchaikovsky;
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 