There must be nearly 50 people in Litton Hall. Stacks of chairs are pushed to the side of the audience area of the performance space at Wesley House, in Ranelagh in Dublin, which is often used for rehearsals. The curtains to the stage are closed, and sunlight is coming through a couple of high windows where the blinds aren’t down. There are plenty of backpacks, jackets and instrument cases. On a large desk near the door sit a few copies of the vocal score for Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
Here, amid the clutter of the 21st century, period instruments and voices fill the room, soaring, powerful, moving, both grave and graceful. They are transporting the few of us listening at the edge back to the early 18th century. Not for nothing does the Irish Baroque Orchestra call itself Ireland’s time-travelling orchestra.
We’re here on foot of the news, still under wraps on the day of this rehearsal, that they are to play at the BBC Proms this summer, performing a 1742 “Dublin version” of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast, dating from the period when the composer lived in Dublin, and pieced together for the first performance since that time.
Today the ensemble is rehearsing Bach’s great choral work for Easter. Twenty or so instrumentalists are sitting in a curve around their artistic director, Peter Whelan, who’s both conducting and dipping down regularly to play harpsichord. There are two basses at the back, the organ in between, violins, violas and cellos in front. Four flutes (made of wood, as for Irish trad), a viola da gamba (similar to a cello) and four varieties of baroque oboe.
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When the musicians change which ones of these they’re playing, it’s as if they’re taking “different instruments from a forest”, Whelan says. Some are old, dating back to the 1700s; most are copies of period instruments, made using 18th-century techniques.
“We try to copy the sounds from that time, to make the music we do – music by Handel, Vivaldi, Bach – sound like you’re hearing it for the first time. So the ink is fresh on the page, and that’s how the audiences are hearing it. That’s the plan. That’s what we hope to do with our work.”
At the front, facing the instrumentalists, are eight adult singers, in two groups of four, and eight children from the choir of St Patrick’s Cathedral. The young choristers, who handle themselves thoroughly professionally, are here for the first part of the rehearsal, working on the sections they sing in, their voices sweet and pure.
Whelan envelops them into the larger ensemble. As rehearsal progresses, he is everywhere, hands, face, and body expressively bringing forward various sections, vigorous, animated. His hands twitch and sweep. He seems to have springs under his feet as he almost bounces or sways. His intake of breath is audible – pfff – or, as a movement subsides: oh. He encourages, praises, instructs. “Lighten it.” “That’s tricky.” “Make sure you hear their voices first.” “The last note is a bit shorter.”
This Passion is almost perfect, ready to go. Whelan talks later about the concept of rehearsal – “Probe” in German, “répétition” in French. The English derives from the medieval term for “harrow again” – “like pulling a plough through a field, and to do that again and again. That’s where ‘rehearsal’ comes from.
“That’s what we do, just keep dragging through the process and finding where there’s weak spots, and trying to get the most out of the drama and get everybody on the same page. It’s just about pulling all the people together and getting the same idea from them.”
The mood is concentrated but confident. These are top-level musicians and singers, at ease with their skill and with each other. Occasionally, there’s a moment of laughter as something unexpected happens. They have been rehearsing St Matthew Passion all week, and are polishing long sections at this stage, teasing out tricky intersections of the 70-plus short movements, chorales and arias. It’s in glorious shape, exulting to hear up close and to witness how they bring it together.
There’s a sort of pleasing disjuncture between then and now: the sounds of the 18th century on baroque instruments, and the lives of the present. Almost as a reminder of this, as a powerful Bach chorus fills the hall, a young woman appears for a few moments, listening unseen at the door, with a tiny infant in her arms. This is Aoibhe Kelly, whose sister Doireann, the orchestra’s general manager, is busy at the desk beside us; Kelly is minding four-month-old Orlando, who’s travelled from Denmark with his mother, the mezzo-soprano Laura Lamph; she is singing her soul out inside.
During a break, Whelan talks about the Irish Baroque Orchestra’s Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall in London on August 30th. It will be just the second time that an ensemble from the Republic of Ireland has performed at the annual eight-week summer festival, which has been showcasing classical music to wide audiences since the BBC began broadcasting it in 1927.
It marks a milestone for the orchestra, following on from an Olivier award in 2022 for their work on Vivaldi’s Bajazet, an Irish National Opera and Royal Opera co-production, and another Olivier nomination this year, for Irish National Opera’s production of another work by Vivaldi, L’Olimpiad, in collaboration with the orchestra.
The German-British Baroque composer George Frideric Handel moved to Dublin, bringing his harpsichord with him briefly; he lived on Abbey Street for a period from late 1741. The first performance of his Messiah was at the New Musick Hall (Mr Neale’s Great Room) on Fishamble Street on April 13th, 1742. That year also saw two Dublin performances, in February and March, of Handel’s oratorio Alexander’s Feast. They were acclaimed at the time, reflecting growing appreciation of his work.
Handel’s setting of Dryden’s ode, Alexander’s Feast, was first performed at Covent Garden Theatre in 1736. The libretto describes a banquet held by Alexander the Great and his lover Thaïs in the captured city of Persepolis, where they are entertained by the bard Timotheus, whose music evokes emotions of joy, love, sorrow and anger in Alexander.
Dryden’s text was adapted by Handel’s friend Newburgh Hamilton, the Irish writer, who “took care not to take any unwarrantable liberties” with the poet’s original.
The version the Irish Baroque Orchestra will perform at the Proms is different. “We’re incredibly proud to bring this music back to life with parts made specially for this occasion – and to do it on such an acclaimed stage is a dream come true,” Whelan says.
Re-creating the Dublin version involves marrying scholarship and musical excellence; Whelan tells a good tale about it. “A lot of the work we’ve been doing here is to find out what Handel found when he was in Dublin. Who are the musicians he was working for, what kind of music was going on?
“We’ve been on this big journey around Messiah, and we’ve discovered so much about the Irish musicians at the time that he found ... We made some discoveries in Pearse Street Library. It was a bit like Indiana Jones, dusting off these old manuscripts. People know Alexander’s Feast, but this Irish version will be something new for a lot of people. We’re really excited.”
In this version’s libretto, “the words are subtly different. And the big difference is that the version most people know is in two parts, and this Irish version is in three parts. There’s extra material, and it’s distributed in a different way. It’s quite an exciting thing for everybody. Even Handel scholars are finding it very exciting. And just to know that we have something that’s Irish, that the rest of the world doesn’t know about.
“We’re proud about classical music. When I was a kid, I felt classical music was extra: it belonged somewhere else and not to us as Irish people. And now we look back and you see these great figures who are here performing, writing special pieces for Irish audiences. I think that’s just great. It brings it home. We’ve owned this music. It belongs to us. It was written for us for 300 years or more. We have a right to be proud about it.”
The newly discovered version is pieced together from “two sets of dusty manuscripts”. The library’s scholars and other staff – “the real heroes behind this story” – found “a word book, basically programme notes from the day, just the libretto and no music. That’s where we found that there’s three parts.”
Some of the music turned up at the Royal College of Music in London, “but not the complete bit of the music, only a bass line that one of the cellos would have been playing, with some of the words written.
“We could piece the two together”, working it out, “so those words more or less fit there. We had to kind of reconstruct it, and then it becomes clear that way. It’s like two little bits that we can join together. It’s a long process, but the bits came together in concrete form over the last year or so.”
Whelan talks about how “some sleuths pointed them out – scholars dragging these things to our attention – and then all the parts just came together. ‘Oh, we could do this ...’” The musicologist Donald Burrows – “he’s Mr Handel” – has been supervising Whelan’s reconstruction of the work.
The Royal Albert Hall invitation came about after the orchestra’s chief executive, Aliye Cornish Moore, invited the director of the Proms at the time, David Pickard, to hear them play at the Royal Opera House in London last year.
“We had been trying to get him to a performance for a while, so we were delighted when he accepted the invitation. He was blown away, and confirmed almost straight away that he wanted the Irish Baroque Orchestra to appear in the 2025 season. It was just a question of what we would perform,” she says.
Cornish Moore is a musician too: she was guest principal violist with the orchestra a few times before taking on the management role, which she says is “a golden opportunity to develop a national period orchestra, and work alongside lovely musicians”. The workload means it’s not feasible for her to play with the orchestra any more, “but I do occasionally fill gaps in our education and participation programming, which I love doing”.
The Dublin version of Alexander’s Feast will be an hour-and-a-half to two hours long, Whelan reckons. It will be a big operation getting the orchestra to London; Culture Ireland is providing support. The Irish Baroque Orchestra will have to grow for the occasion, to well over 100 musicians and singers.
“It has to be huge, because it’s in the Albert Hall,” he says. “It’s the biggest version of ourselves there’s ever been.” In the rehearsal, he’s just stepped out of “it’s basically one person singing each part”. For the Proms, “there will be a big choir, a full choir to fill that space. It’ll be just a big crowd of people. We need to be a giant version of ourselves.”
The Ulster Orchestra has performed at the Proms; the only other orchestra from south of the Border to have been invited was the New Irish Chamber Orchestra, which performed way back in 1979.
Lindsay Armstrong, that ensemble’s cofounder, first manager and oboe player, recalls their all-Bach programme that evening, conducted by the noted Irish Bach interpreter John Beckett. Mary Gallagher was the orchestra’s leader; the singers were the soprano Irene Sandford, the contralto Bernadette Greevy, the tenor Frank Patterson and the bass William Young, along with the Cantata Singers.
Armstrong and his wife, Gillian Smith, who are now friends of Whelan’s, are “delighted for Peter and the IBO”. Whelan was a piano student of Smith’s for years at the Royal Irish Academy of Music; she was involved in him getting his first bassoon.
The Irish Baroque Orchestra is vowing to do more than celebrate a forgotten version of a masterpiece: it also plans to “remind audiences that baroque music is anything but modest: it’s thrilling, dramatic and alive with energy and emotion. The IBO is on a mission to demystify the genre, inviting music lovers of all backgrounds to experience its raw power.”
Whelan says, “It’s really a coup.”
The BBC Proms 2025 run from Friday, July 18th, until Saturday, September 13th. The Irish Baroque Orchestra’s performance of Alexander’s Feast will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday, August 30th, at 7.30pm
