Gwilym Bowen

York Early Music Festival

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

York Early Music Festival
3-11 July 2026

The 2026 York Early Music Festival celebrated its 50th birthday with a week of performances from Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers to Bruhn’s/Keiser’s St Mark Passion, including a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of John Dowland. I was there to review the closing event of the festival, the two days of informal concerts and the final of the biennial York Early Music International Young Artists Competition (reviewed here), but managed to take in a few of the festival events.

By far the most important of the festival concerts I attended was the final one, on 10 July in The Quire of York Minster, when Solomon’s Knot presented their version of a St Mark Passion. This was composed in Hamburg around 1700, copied out by Bach in the early 1710s, and revived ot exactly 400 years ago in Leipzig on Good Friday 1726. This is the version performed, although Bach also adapted it for a performance in the mid-1740s. Originally billed in the Festival as by Bruhns (not the earlier North German organist, but the music director at Hamburg Cathedral), but more usually referred to as by Kaiser, the far more likely composer. The link to the programme notes for this, and other festival concerts, can be found here. Whoever composed it, it is a remarkable piece, with fascinating insights into the Passion tradition in North Germany during Bach’s youth. It also raised interesting aspects of performance in a huge space like York Minster.

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Gluck: Bauci e Filemone & Orfeo

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

Christoph Willibald Gluck
Bauci e Filemone & Orfeo (from Le feste d’Apollo)
Classical Opera/The Mozartists. Ian Page
Queen Elizabeth Hall. 29 May 2019

As a continuation of their Mozart 250 project, Classical Opera travelled back 250 years to explore the year 1769 with extracts from Gluck’s Le feste d’Apollo, composed for the wedding celebrations of 15-year-old Ferdinand, Duke of Parma and the 23-year-old Austrian Archduchess Maria Amalia, youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I. She was against the idea of this dynastic match from the start, not least because she was in love with a Bavarian Prince, who was deemed socially beneath her. Given that background, it must have been a bit of a strain for her to sit through the three short operas that make up Gluck’s Le feste d’Apollo, two of which were performed in this concert. The opening extract Bauci e Filemone is a rather soppy story of the power of love, whilst the well-known story of Orfeo tells a similar, but rather darker tale of love and relationships. Continue reading →

Spitalfields Music: Christmas Oratorio

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson ~ Leave a comment

Spitalfields Music: Christmas Oratorio
Solomon’s Knot
St Leonard’s, Shoreditch. 15 December 2015

In what they described as a “subtle dramatisation”, the Solomon’s Knot Baroque Collective performed four of the six cantatas that make up Bach’s so-called ‘Christmas Oratorio’ as the closing concert of this years Spitalfields Music Winter Festival. And they did it with the eight singers all singing from memory. What could so easily have been a bit of a gimmick turned out to be a thought-provoking experience, at least from the audience’s perspective. One of the aims of Solomon’s Knot is to ‘remove the barriers (visible and invisible) between performers and spectators’. This performance certainly did that. Initially having eight singers gazing directly at us seemed like opening your front door to a massed gathering of Mormons, all earnest looking in matching dark suits and (in this case, red) ties. Or perhaps we had stumbled into some sort of revivalist meeting – or an Alcoholics Anonymous gathering.

The ‘dramatisation’ was certainly subtle. There was no obvious acting, merely glances between the performers, a slight re-positioning on stage, a couple moving together and, later, a sedate confrontation with a rather buttoned-up Herod. But what was immediately apparent was that they were singing directly to us, making direct eye contact with the audience. The group went out of their way Continue reading →

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson ~ 1 Comment

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria
Academy of Ancient Music, Richard Egarr
Barbican, 29 September 2015

The Academy of Ancient Music completed their trilogy of Barbican performances of Monteverdi operas with Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria in what was build as a ‘concert hall staging’, but was as close to a fully-staged opera as you could get without props or scenery. Rather like the recent Monteverdi Choir / London Baroque Soloists production of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice at the Royal Opera House, the stage depth was divided into three parts, with the instrumentalists occupying the centre ground. The Gods spent most of their time on the higher level behind the orchestra, with mortals at the front of the stage. Both had forays into the audience, accompanied by rather overdone spotlights brightly illuminating those of the audience sitting near the aisles. Continue reading →