Guts and Glory
Spiritato!
St John’s Smith Square. 15 April 2016
The young period instrument group Spiritato! is one of the most exciting arrivals on the UK early music scene. Their most recent and most ambitious project is Guts and Glory, exploring the relatively little-known repertoire of military and art music for natural trumpets, which they contrasted with more reflective (or, at least, quieter) works by the same composers for strings and continuo. A key feature of this 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.

Not surprisingly, it was the distinctive tuning that results from valveless trumpets was a major feature of the evening. When played in their lower Continue reading →