Goy sets early music standard

THE annual East Cork Early Music Festival is in its 10th year.

The organisers have curtailed the number of events, but have not dropped their high standards. From the first, intriguing, free lecture/recital by Swiss virtuoso, Pierre Goy, this year’s festival was as entertaining as the nine that preceded it.

The venue for what may have been Cork’s first public recital on a clavichord was the Stack Theatre of CIT Cork School of Music. The fascinating keyboard was beloved of composers from the 16th to the 19th centuries, for its gentleness and responsiveness. Goy’s expressiveness was astonishing; when, following beautiful performances of CPE Bach’s music, he played Mozart’s Fantasie in D minor, it was as if he was revealing an approach to the music that was Romantic yet convincing. The clarity of articulation and the expressiveness of his playing (using vibrato, portamento, and rubato) were extraordinary.

The high standard set by Goy was continued in the evening performance, in the Curtis Auditorium, by the brilliant Baroque violinist, Rachel Podger, and the six other members of the Brecon Ensemble. They played five concertos, one each for cello and harpsichord, two for solo violin, and one for three violins, by Bach and Vivaldi.

Having heard Pekka Kuusisto and the Irish Chamber Orchestra playing Bach’s E major concerto on modern instruments, at concert pitch, I was anxious to hear how the lower Baroque pitch, together with the lighter bow and gut strings, would affect the audibility of the solo part. Even though there was just one player per part in this performance, the accompaniment did occasionally drown the solo part when playing in the lower register.

This did not detract from moving accounts of the slow movements of both violin concertos, and delightfully rhythmic accounts of the outer movements.

Neither Vivaldi’s Cello Concerto in B flat (soloist, Jonathan Manson) nor Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D minor (soloist, Marcin Swiatkiewicz), despite splendid performances, had the magical qualities of the violin concertos. I was acutely conscious of the beauty of the tone quality from the viola of June Rogers and the violone of Jan Spencer. The climax of the concert came when all three violinists, Podger, Bojan Cicic, and Johannes Pramschler, combined in Vivaldi’s exhilarating Concerto for Three Violins in F major. The outer movements of this were brilliantly virtuosic and the slow movement as captivating as that in his Winter Concerto from the Four Seasons.

Professor of medieval song at Trinity College of Music, Belinda Sykes refers to the group, Joglaresa, which she directs, as a folk group, but they are as different from liturgical folk/ballad groups as a full symphony orchestra. The three singers and three instrumentalists who make up this group perform music of the middle ages (from the 11th to the 14th centuries), in a variety of languages (Latin, French and English) and do so with enormous energy, skill, and commitment. Their repertoire is quite unique and the exuberance and sheer ‘in-your-face’, no-holds-barred nature of their delivery at the Curtis Auditorium was stunning.

The Grainstore, Ballymaloe, was the venue for the Dublin virtuoso bassoonist, Peter Whelan, and his colleagues from France, Holland, England and Germany in Ensemble Marsyas.

I never suspected that modern reproductions of Baroque oboes, bassoon, violone, and harpsichord could make such beautifully full, rich-sounding music. In an utterly charming, highly entertaining programme that included a harpsichord suite by Mattheson, a Handel keyboard Capriccio, Trio Sonatas by Handel and Vivaldi, two works completely captivated me. These were the Frenchman Boismortier’s Sonata for Bassoon and the Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Trio Sonata, which the ensemble is about to record.