CityLife

The Academy of Ancient Music: Nature's Voice and Verse

Academy Of Ancient Music
Bridgewater Hall
June 3, 2010

“Let's talk about the weather” has always been a motto for the British when they can’t think of anything else to do - and music about the weather seems an equally popular idea.

It must have been the thinking behind the Academy of Ancient Music’s concert, with Elin Manahan Thomas their guest soprano, at any rate. The music consisted of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons concertos – plenty of weather in those – interspersed with songs by Purcell and Handel. 

Pavlo Beznosiuk was the violin soloist and director, and led the Academy in playing of impeccable baroque style. And it’s not just satisfying to feel that you’re hearing the notes played in the way late 17th or 18th century composers would have expected: there are plenty of places where they actually work better that way.

So, in the musical Springwatch of the first Vivaldi concerto, the trilling birdies were much more lifelike played vibrato-less than they are in the Nigel Kennedy style, and the thunder effect in the Summer concerto had a real distant rumble to it (achieved, I think, by allowing sympathetic vibration from strings not actually played). I guess we have Mr Beznosiuk to thank for touches like that, as well as the beauty and skill of his own violin solos.

Occasionally nature was forgotten in the excitement of musical texture-making. The cuckoo of summer’s first movement must have been on speed to get its cry out as fast as this one did, and the raindrops in the Winter slow movement fell so motor-like that they sounded like some kind of post-modernists – Vivaldi as re-written by John Adams, perhaps.

But it was all highly inventive and very entertaining. The orchestra’s other task was to play dances and accompaniments for songs from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, and for the Handel arias, with Elin Manahan Thomas the soprano. She was a joy to hear, and the style and pure voice quality she brought were unimpeachable.

There is a thin-gruel aspect to baroque music which can build up if it’s not interpreted with maximum variety and imagination, and I found myself wondering whether the constant clatter of the harpsichord was really necessary in her opening songs from the Purcell set. The liveliness of the dance rhythms made up for lack of colour variation (or any real percussion, Paula Chatauneuf’s guitar efforts notwithstanding), though, and when it came to the Handel, the acrobatic and athletic feats in the voice part were remarkable. 

And she has a sweet smile that makes even music about disdain, resentment and despair sound completely beautiful. Her encore (Dell’ Aura Al Sussurrar from Vivaldi’s Dorilla In Tempe) restored the springlike mood quite literally, as it’s a re-write of the opening of The Four Seasons.

Tweet