Christ Church, Dublin
Boyce — Symphony No 6.
Purcell — King Arthur Suite.
Mudge — Concerto Grosso No 2 in D minor.
Kusser — Suite No 4 from Apollon Enjoué.
Handel— Il pastor fido Overture.
It was an odd lineup at Christ Church Cathedral on Saturday. A handful of English composers (Boyce, Purcell, Mudge), plus a German who famously worked in London (Handel) and a Hungarian (Kusser) who did so, too, but has been all but forgotten.
The connecting thread behind the selection, however, was not London but 18th-century Dublin. The Handel connection is the obvious one of Messiah. Boyce's Symphony No. 6 is also the overture to his serenata, Solomon, which is known to have been performed in Dublin in 1744, if not earlier.
Johann Sigismund Kusser (who became known as Jean Sigismond Cousser after a sojourn in Paris), lived and worked in Dublin for 10 years, from 1707 until his death, and he held important musical posts in the city. Purcell and Mudge made the cut as representatives of the taste of the time.
Christian Curnyn and the period players of the Irish Baroque Orchestra brought an appealing snappiness to the Boyce and gave characterful accounts of a selection of movements from Purcell's King Arthur.
They were rather less persuasive in the concerto grosso by Richard Mudge, a work written in an enterprising and adventurous spirit that somehow doesn’t manage to hold all its twists and turns coherently together. Both music and music-making sounded at their best in the bracing and busy writing of the finale.
Kusser’s Suite in C, from a collection of his music published in Stuttgart in 1700 (most of his later music is lost), functions on a much higher level, French in flavour, and with a particularly fine, inventive and sophisticated movement exploiting echo effects.
Handel, of course, is on a higher level again. The Overture to Il pastor fidois not so much what you would expect from an overture, but rather an actual suite. Its penultimate movement included the evening's most daring gesture, a section scored for the rather bizarrely bare-sounding combination of solo double bass and bassoon.
