The London Handel Players
St Andrew’s and St George’s Church - 20/01/24
The hugely successful concert series put on by the Georgian Concert Society of Edinburgh continued on Saturday night with a programme of baroque instrumental music, given by the London Handel Players. This much-acclaimed ensemble, founded 24 years ago, is noted for its authentic and stylish performances of the music of Handel and his contemporaries, and this one was no exception. Rachel Brown (flute), Adrian Butterfield (violin), Sarah McMahon (cello) and Silas Wollston (harpsichord) played a selection of sonatas and trio sonatas, showing great technical virtuosity as well as a beautifully balanced ensemble with refined playing. Each player was given a chance to shine, but it was the upper instruments which stole the show. It always takes me a few minutes to adjust my ears to the mellow tones of a baroque flute; the earlier version of the flute was constructed quite differently from the modern one and varied greatly in size and bore. The inventor of the modern flute, Theobald Böhm, created an instrument that has stayed more or less the same since he displayed it in 1851 at the London Exhibition, but nowadays, flautists are able to perform on a variety of original and reconstructed instruments, so we can hear what Bach and Handel were writing for. Rachel Brown is one of the world’s finest baroque flute players, and her command of her instrument was staggering. She played Bach’s flute sonata in E Minor, and I particularly enjoyed the third movement, andante, a gentle arioso formed over a ground bass structure. This is music to charm the ear, and the musicians combined exquisitely to do that very thing.
Adrian Butterfield is also one of the stars of the early music firmament, a veritable Benedetti of the baroque fiddle. I have noticed through my long years of singing solo with some of the finest baroque ensembles in the world, like the English Concert, les Musiciens du Louvre, Concerto Vocale and the Dunedin Consort, that the standard of musicianship among the instrumentalists is amazing, but that most of them are very reticent and unshowy. Let me give a big shout out to these unsung heroes of the musical world! Adrian played perhaps the most famous of Corelli’s violin sonatas, the ‘Follia’, published in 1700 in Rome. I was lucky enough, 30 years ago, to sing two solo bass cantatas by Bach in the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, where Corelli was employed as court musician to Cardinal Ottoboni, and where he held sway as the finest violinist in the world at the time. ‘Follia’ (Madness) was a dance of Portuguese origin, in which the dancers whirled and swung about in an increasing frenzy, and this tune is treated to innumerable variations by Corelli in an absolute tour de force for the violin. Towards the climax of the piece, Rachel Brown added a pair of thrillingly played castanets to the mix, resulting in a huge cheer from the transfixed audience.
The concert continued with a lovely trio sonata by Geminiani, a favourite of King George I, and concluded with Telemann’s Paris Quartet No 3, a superb piece in the French style by Germany’s great composer, player and showman. Imagine an 18th century version of André Rieu, without the cheesiness and with immeasurably more talent, and you have an idea of the fame and popularity of Georg Phillip Telemann. The London Handel Players gave an excellent rendition of this great piece, featuring all four instrumentalists. Sarah McMahon, the Irish cellist, exhibited fantastic technique and terrific virtuosity playing the myriad notes expected by Telemann, and Silas Wollston was a most sympathetic and attentive member of the ensemble at the harpsichord.
The big audience was treated at the end to an encore of an instrumental arrangement of an aria from Handel’s ‘Hercules,’ and we all stumbled out into the mayhem of Saturday night on George Street, inspired and inwardly glowing.
