Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet mischievously described interpreting Haydn’s piano sonatas as “putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton… You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”
Two intriguing themes and two great guest artists were offered by the BBC Philharmonic to their Saturday night audience in the Bridgewater Hall: the themes were what “classicism” really is, and the variety of music inspired by (or written for) dance.
Ian Page’s “journey of a lifetime” with his Mozartists, taking the greatest genius year by year, lands us in 1773 with the adolescent Mozart's first durable crowdpleaser, the pretty-brilliant motet for soprano and orchestra Exsultate, jubilate (last night was its 250th anniversary). The boy wonder still needs annual support from his elders, though, and as usual we got more than just a sampler of what else was going on musically in that year.
Across three and a half decades, John Eliot Gardiner’s 1987 recording of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists spoiled one for live performances. Not that many of those weren’t equally fine and alive in different ways, but none I experienced gave us all six, equally glorious cantatas.
If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.
In some ways the concerto da camera was the 18th-century music equivalent of the hatchback – only slightly larger in scale than a basic chamber work but with an ambition that allowed it to carry ideas associated with more substantial structures.
At St John’s Smith Square, the dynamic ensemble El Gran Teatro del Mundo gave a diverting tour of this distinctive form, titled "The Art of Conversation", taking us from Germany down to the Mediterranean through Italy and Spain before circling back to Germany again.
Though billed as a “concert performance”, this was really much more than that. With the resources of their own theatre, Opera North’s team present a staging that employs a big, built-up and raked floor, with a simple platform in the centre and a starry-night black back-cloth, and their principals and chorus move and act in simple but effective style.
The Dunedin Consort are most readily associated with the music of the Baroque, but this concert showed that they’re every bit as good at playing the music of the next generation. At times, in fact, I was taken aback by the magisterial scale of the orchestral sound as they played Mozart’s great C Minor Mass.
Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every time he plays them. Would De Keersmaeker alone be able to hold her own dancing to this inventory of technical rigour and human emotions?