Above: (l-r) Salut! Baroque members John Ma, Julia Russionello, Isiah Bondfield, Brad Tham,Monika Kornel and Tim Blomfield. (Performance photo from Canberra concert). Featured image: visiting recorder player, Anna Stegmann.
Salut! Baroque turns 30 this year. And the party has well and truly started. The aptly titled first concert- ‘Music to Celebrate’- was an entertaining event. Its structure was a satisfying swoop from the early to late Baroque and beyond.
This concert was a celebration of music history where music was no longer made for the strict service of the Church. Branching out into concert venues, glorifying instrumentalists and mimicking drama from opera and other text setting, Baroque compositional development was about to go on a lush and lucid journey.
‘Music to Celebrate’, the concert, was a captivating journey in itself. It was held in beautifully blended, elegant, eloquent, emotional stead by an agile assisting phalanx of four recorder superstars. The recorder, in all it’s sizes and guises, was a Baroque stalwart of an instrument with so many voices and colours to offer. Thanks to this stellar quartet the instrument was championed even more than normal in the Salut! Baroque lineup during this concert.
Salut! Baroque co-founder, recorder player Sally Melhuish OAM was joined throughout the programme by no less than three other local and visiting virtuosi. The compelling presence of recorder quartets, concerto soloists and richly fleshed out wind ranks in the ensemble were the order of the day for this event.
The remaining contingent of five string players and harpsichord once more provided performances which were impressively gestured. High-level communication between them, good momentum and intricate colourings helped build the secular instrumental works with expertly shaped depictions of dramatic situations plus a celebration of nature.
Central to this concert’s entertaining pastiche was Giovanni Guido’s programmatic music, namely his pre-Vivaldi Four Seasons movement excerpt from ‘Summer’ out of his Four Seasons. The strings and keyboard nicely demarcated the drama and reflection on nature as well as the power of the harvest goddess depicted in this excerpt.
The strings and harpsichord were joined for agile recorder work by visiting UK professor Anna Stegmann. Stegmann added joyous tone and slick choreography to the the ‘Danse des faunes’ to end our chance to glimpse another Baroque composer’s Quattro Staggioni.
This entire concert opened with an early seventeenth century work by Tarquino Merula. This opening celebrated nature in music-here a song about a nightingale written for a quartet of any instruments. This work also celebrated the event’s recorder quartet.
The bright, effervescent and well-articulated feature group’s playing was an impressive start to the afternoon. This recorder quartet’s blend and ensemble tracing of the programmatic portrait made them a fine team to realise Merula’s vignette.
The recorder quartet returned two items later for Johann Schickhardt’s Concerto in G minor to excellent effect, with superb contrasts between movements, continued excellence of blend and mellifluous lines.
Above: This concert’s recorder quartet: (l-r) Alicia Crossley, Alana Blackburn, Anna Stegmann and Sally Melhuish.
Into the Baroque music chronology was boldly inserted Jan Rokyta’s twentieth-century work for recorder quartet, Balkanology (1969). This contrast and leap forward in time to a piece by the Moravian cimbalom and recorder player was a spellbinding addition to this celebration of Baroque stylistic ornateness and invention.
In the hands of these players (Alicia Crossley, Alana Blackburn, Sally Melhuish, and Anna Stegmann) the challenging Turkish-style Romanian dance rhythms, the progressive harmonies, the elaborate ornamentation and rocketing, long, complex lines were easily conquered. This non-Baroque work was a true audience favourite and the quartet assembled was a successful troupe with which to depart momentarily from Salut! Baroque’s regular focus period in music history.
Concerti for four players or more, with excellent ensemble playing, filled out the remainder of ‘Music to Celebrate’. Predicament (of the deserted Ariadne on Naxos) was nicely conveyed in unison group pulsations and gestures throughout Locatelli’s multi-movement work, Concerto à quattro in E flat major Op 7 No 6, Arianna’s Tears.
Now it wouldn’t be a Baroque party demonstrating the evolution of instrumental music without a bit of dance music. This came in the form of Johann Schmelzer’s Balletti for full ensemble. Nice caricatures of individual dance trends emerged in this part of the well-curated Salut! Baroque Concert.
Two late-era concerti demonstrated vivildly the zenith that Baroque period instrumental music had reached. The vibrant sound of Vivaldi’s three-movement Concerto in D minor RV 566 (1720) was a highlight of the programme.
It did not conclude the afternoon’s musical flow, however. That place was saved chronologically for Georg Telemann’s Concerto a quattro in A minor TWV 43:a3 from 1750, completing the swoop in this programme from flashes of burgeoning Baroque in 1615 through to music at the height of the style. Finishing this musical journey of some 135 years with Telemann, a well-known great of the era, the four players realised the tempo alternations of this work’s movements with elegant colours and exciting interactions across the group.
Especially rewarding was the chance to follow Anna Stegmann’s recorder line as the articulation, harmonic emphasis and phrasing highlighted her instrument. Once again the recorder was celebrated as a steady solo and ensemble star of this concert, of the Baroque and beyond.
The second concert in Salut Baroque’s 30 birthday year – ‘Baroque Spirit’ -takes place once more at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on Sunday 13 April at 3pm.
