The Freiburger Barockorchester: ‘La Foresta Incantata’
Berliner Philharmonie, Kammersaal, 17/10/22
The title of this concert was ‘La Foresta Incantata’ (the enchanted forest) and the idea was to interweave a trio of baroque composers working around the same time with their work. Handel and Vivaldi are obvious choices but Francesco Geminiani is less well known. He was a great violin player and often led Handel’s orchestras, but was also a composer and wrote ‘The Enchanted Forest’ for a theatrical production. On the basis of tonight’s work he deserves to be better known.
The Freiburger Barockorchester were founded in 1987 with the mission “to enliven the world of baroque music with new sounds”. Since then they have become well known across Europe with their performances using authentic baroque instruments. Tonight they were performing in the smaller hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Kammersaal, but this ‘small hall’ still seats 1180 people and the third full audience looked a little thin tonight - though 400 people or thereabouts would be a very decent audience for the Queens Hall in Edinburgh. The Berlin audience certainly enjoyed the concert.
The concert began with some symphonic extracts from Handel’s opera ‘Rinaldo’, which I remember first enjoying on a Metropolitan Opera Midwest tour in Minneapolis in 1984. The old joke about Handel operas - too many arias and often sounding the same - didn’t apply tonight; firstly there were no arias and only three symphonic extracts which displayed the skill of the musicians with their baroque instruments, and the coherence of this very experienced ensemble. Particularly noteworthy was Jörg Halubek’s playing of Handel’s ‘The Cuckoo and the Nightingale’ on a small transportable baroque organ. This, added to the excellent acoustic of the Kammersaal, made it a delightful evening.
The highlight of the evening was the performance of the Blockflöte (more recognisable to us as a recorder) by Isabel Lehmann, who really made her instrument sing in Vivaldi’s concerto in G ‘La Notte’. The harpsichord and small organ added to the wide range of baroque instruments in this very experienced 30 strong ensemble, led by Gottfried Von Der Goltz on the violin. The orchestra got a warm reception from the audience who were rewarded with a stirring encore - a perfect baroque concert.
