Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle
Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Jakob Lehmann,
Robyn Allegra Parton, Natalie Lewis, Petr Nekoranec, Bogdan Talos
Alexandra Palace Theatre, 18 October 2026
This event was a musical revelation! Billed as “the first performance in modern times on period instruments” of the orchestrated version of Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle, this concert made it abundantly clear why it is so important to hear music played with the sound that the composer and early audiences would have heard. On this occasion, it was the orchestral forces of the appropriately named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with the Monteverdi Choir, brilliantly led by the very knowledgeable conductor Jakob Lehmann who had very obviously done a lot of research into the score and the musical background and performing conventions of the time. The venue was the enormous theatre in the Alexandra Palace complex with a surprisingly good acoustic for these musical forces, all enlivened by the sparse remains of some delightful wall decorations, all in a state of arrested decay.
The London Bach Society was founded 70 years ago by Dr Paul Steinitz under the rather unambitious title of the ‘South London Bach Society’, but soon lost the ‘South’ part of the name. 1946 might not seem to be the ideal time to concentrate on things musical (and, indeed, devoted to a German composer), but they were not alone: The Arts Council and BBC Third Programme were launched around then, as were a number of orchestras. From the start, the focus of the LBS was to ‘get back to Bach in its original form’ at a time when Bach performance was very far from what we could no consider as being in any way ‘authentic’ with enormous choirs and orchestras, and a funereal approach to tempo and romantic notions of instrumentation, phrasing and articulation. To this end, the Steinitz Bach Players was founded, in 1968, bringing together a small group of professional musicians interested in period performance techniques on period instruments.
