BREMF: Truly Madly Baroque – Red Priest

This is how to start a Brighton Early Music Festival: popular performers, familiar as old friends, a full house and extravagant music. Not that the programme seemed unusual: Vivaldi, Bach, Handel etc. are all perfectly normal, yet we were promised truly mad Baroque. A few tentative hoots on the recorder and the expectant crowd settled immediately as the Vivaldi began to flow, and gush and rush from these hyperactive performers. The mastery of their instruments is supreme. Only the harpsichordist had the written notes in front of him, like a safety net in case any of these musicians went too wild. In this first number there were so many changes of mood, of recorders, of timbre, of speed etc. that we were left in no doubt of the skill, virtuosity and musicianship. This concert was all about the performance.

Piers Adams selected his recorders as an artist would his brushes. Julia Bishop (violin) and Angela East (cello) kept up with him in the variety of sounds and colours that they managed to extract from their instruments. I’m not sure that I didn’t somehow hear the merry click of castanets at one point. It could have come from the cello or David Wright’s harpsichord which delivered an amazing bouquet of sounds, from the deepest drones to shrill tinklings, always maintaining a steady foundation for the frolics of his partners.

However, it wasn’t just frantic brilliance and showy circus acts. These folk can play to your heart too, as with the soulful Bach Adagio from ‘Truly Madly Deeply’, a film of loss, grief and remembrance, that was dedicated this evening to the memory of Deborah Roberts. Her spirit is sure to be hovering over all the events of this the final festival she compiled.

Truly Madly Baroque is what we came for and even in the stillest moments there was the threat or promise of mayhem. Handel and Bach played this well can get out of hand and we were breathless, not Mr Adams. The Brandenburg Concerto, split by the interval, exhibited all the astonishing qualities of the harpsichord. The Telemann gave us two wildly contrasting movements and then the unfamiliar Royer was as unsettling as its title Vertigo should be.

A gentle Handel aria allowed us to relax before the barrage of musical fun that was La Folia (Madness), as realised by Corelli with plenty of help from Red Priest. The slowest moment, with its quote from Elgar’s cello concerto, threw us off guard before the crazy tumbles and flourishes of the final variations. The recorder isn’t really a percussion instrument but it almost sounded so, and I’m not sure what it was in the mysterious encore that only just managed to pacify all the thunderous applause.

St George’s Church,
11 October 2024

Rating:

Antonio Vivaldi – Concerto in A minor (orig. B minor) from L’Estro Armonico

JS Bach – Adagio in Bb BWV 1029 (theme from ‘Truly Madly Deeply’)

George Frideric Handel – Sonata in F major Op. 2 No. 4

Henry Purcell; Maurizio Cazzati; Diego Ortiz – A Suite of Grounds

JS Bach  – Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 : Allegro, Affettuoso, Allegro

Georg Philipp Telemann – Largo and Presto from Concerto in E minor

Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer – Vertigo

Handel – Aria Amorosa from Op. 2 No. 1

Arcangelo Corelli, Red Priest – La Folia (Madness)