Robin BIgwood

La Serenissima: Vivaldi Double Concertos

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

Vivaldi Double Concertos
La Serenissima, Adrian Chandler 
St Martin-in-the-Fields. 11 February 2023


In what was described as “a carnival of double concertos from 18th century Venice – music of fantasy, flamboyance and virtuosity to the power of two”, La Serenissima and its “charismatic founder” Adrian Chandler bought its “no-holds-barred flamboyance” to St Martin-in-the-Fields. It was a reminder of St Martin’s endless ‘Vivaldi by Candlelight’ tourist concerts, although their concert promotions are rather more elevated these days. As the publicity blurb enthused: “Baroque Venice was a city of doubles – of shimmering reflections and masked revellers. And since nothing succeeds like excess, when Vivaldi wrote concertos for two soloists, the results were spectacular: a carnival of colour, illusion and sparkling sonic conversation”.

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Bristol Early Music Festival

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

Bristol Early Music Festival
Online from 7-9 May 2021

The Bristol Early Music Festival was founded in 2018, and ran its first festival the following year. Covid led to the cancellation of the 2020 festival, and this year’s weekend festival is based on videos, most commissioned by the Festival, with live Zoom question & answer sessions after most of the videos. The festival videos and further information on each event are available here. They can be accessed until May 14th, but the Q&A Zooms were only available live. The videos are free to watch, but donations are very welcome through this link. Because of the nature of the event, and the ready availability of the events, I will not attempt a critical review, but rather just make readers aware of this interesting event.

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Baroque at the Edge Festival

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

Baroque at the Edge Festival
Recorded at  LSO St Luke’s, London
Broadcast online between 7-10 January 2021, available to 31 March 2021

In pre-coronavirus days, the musically barren early days of January have been enlivened by the imaginative Baroque at the Edge Festival, usually spanning a weekend in venues around their home base of LSO at St Luke’s in London. Previous festivals are reviewed here and here. Run by Artistic Director Lindsay Kemp and Festival Manager Lucy Bending (the team behind the London Festival of Baroque Music and its predecessor, the Lufthansa Festival), the festival has secured a place in the London concert scene with their refreshing approach to Baroque music, as exemplified by such banners as “No rules, no boundaries – just Baroque music set loose” and “Imagine if Vivaldi was a folk-fiddler, Purcell a protest-singer, or Bach a techno-geek”. The more succinct and apt “No rules, no walls” for this year’s Covid-constrained festival reflected the on-line nature of the events.

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Art of Moog: Bach and beats

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

Art of Moog: Bach & beats
Waterloo Festival
The Cello Factory, Waterloo, 18 June 2019

Bach was influenced by a wide range of musical styles of his time, travelling to learn about other musical traditions and copying manuscripts of other composers. If he had been around, not in the 1700s, but in the 1960s, when the likes of Pink Floyd, Keith Emmerson, and Rick Wakeman were active; when Wendy Carlos’s ‘Switched-On Bach’ was released and, a few years later, when Kraftwerk highlighted their genre of electronic synth-pop, then he would surely have appreciated the world of synthesised music. Indeed, his own instrument, the organ, is a giant wind-blown synthesiser, with the names and sounds of most of its stops replicating Renaissance instruments. The four-strong group Art of Moog base their music on Bach, Wendy Carlos and Kraftwerk under the banner of ’21st-century Hyper-Bach on Synthesizers’.

Their concert for the Waterloo Festival was given in the delightful Cello Factory, an art gallery in the streets close to London’s Waterloo Station. Three distinguished early-music harpsichord players (Robin Bigwood, Steven Devine & Marin Perkins) gathered around a collection of keyboards, synthesisers, vocoders and other complicated looking little boxes, together with the equally distinguished recorder player Annabel Knight, who clipped an EWI5000 (an Electronic Wind Instrument) onto a lanyard around her neck. This was not going to be a ‘normal’ period instrument early music event – indeed, we were told that what we were about to hear was “absolutely bonkers”. Continue reading →