Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
Bach – Suite No 4. Vivaldi – Violin Concerto in F RV569. Concerto da Camera in G minor RV103. Rameau – Les Paladins Suite.
It’s hard not to feel that performances of Bach’s Fourth Orchestral Suite that omit the trumpets and drums are offering an inferior substitute rather than the real thing. The trumpets and drums are left out in the spirit of trying to recreate the work as Bach might have originally conceived it. Note the word “might”. It’s a what-if presentation rather than a certainty of any kind. And the appropriate analogy is less that of food without the requisite seasoning, and more that of a dish without an essential ingredient.
That’s how it’s sounded to me before, and that’s how it sounded again in the final instalment of the Irish Baroque Orchestra’s current Masterworks series at Christ Church Cathedral on Sunday. The performance was not helped by some of director Monica Huggett’s speeds, which were simply too fast to allow for any real clarity in the cathedral acoustic. The two concertos by Vivaldi came from opposite ends of the scale, the Concerto da Camera in G minor requiring just five instruments (recorder, oboe, bassoon, harpsichord and lute), the Violin Concerto in F having busy parts for pairs of horns and oboes and a bassoon.
The approach to the larger concerto, with Huggett herself as soloist, was at the wilder end of the IBO’s style. The playing found itself under all kinds of unnecessary stresses, pushing musicians and music to the edge and beyond. The effect at times was not unlike that of the contraption in a scene from Wallace and Gromit where everything is dangerously but entertainingly bursting at the seams. The smaller concerto, with Andreas Helm on recorder, was, by comparison, the epitome of musicianly containment.
The evening's star turn, however, was the suite from Les Paladins, the last of Rameau's operas that the composer was to see staged. Everything in the playing came sharply into focus here, and the combination of musical inventiveness and rich scoring were a real delight.
