{TABLE} Three songs ............................................... Casialdi La Fortune ................................................ Monteclair La Morangais ou La Plissay Forqueray L'Impatience ......... Rameau Four songs ................................................ Blow Three pieces for bass viol and continuo ................... Hume Round O for harpsichord ................................... Purcell Five songs ................................................ Purcell {/TABLE} SUNDAY night's concert at Birr Castle given as part of the AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses, was both rewarding and encouraging.
John Elwes (tenor), Sarah Cunningham (viola da gamba) and Malcolm Proud (harpsichord), played a programme of 17th century music from Italy, France and England, and gave performances which mixed stylistic definition with seeming spontaneity qualities upheld as essential by contemporary accounts of Baroque playing.
Sarah Cunningham's scintillating account of Forqueray's chaconne La Morangais ou La Plissay relished technical challenge, yet was driven by purely musical shaping. She is a superlative continuo player, the sort who can imbue a long pedal point, like that at the beginning of Purcell's song Tis Nature's Voice, with spine tingling tension. Surely, she is amongst the finest gamba players of modern times.
Malcolm Proud's continuo playing had a well nigh impeccable balance of individuality and support. His one solo item Purcell's Round O (Z. T684) was pleasingly muscular.
The historical performance movement is overloaded with singing of an Oxbridge choir derived cleanness, and a virgin like, dispassionate purity, entirely at odds with the nature of the texts which inspired most of the music. John Elwes is not like that. He is one of the few singers who, whether in French, English or Italian, makes the music seem to spring from the text. That, after all, is how the music began. Historically aware performance of vocal music is turning a corner, and Elwes, with his utter lack of foppishness, is doing as much as anybody to turn it in a more rewarding direction.
