Handel in the Strand
Paxton House, 23/07/24
Kate Calder
Ensemble Hesperi - Magdalena Loth-Hill baroque violin, Mary-Jannet Leith recorders, Florence Petit baroque cello, Thomas Allery harpsichord
Ensemble Hesperi, founded in 2019, are an award-winning quartet who play baroque instruments, and who have built up a reputation for imaginative programming of lesser-known music of the period. Tonight’s concert entitled ‘Handel on the Strand’ presents music by Handel and his contemporaries, most of whom lived and worked in London as it became the music-making hub of Europe. One of the nice features of Paxton House concerts is the closeness of the performers to the audience which encourages them to speak about the music and their instruments. Magdalena Loth-Hill, whom we’ve heard play earlier in the week with the Consone Quartet, Music at Paxton’s resident ensemble, shows us the smaller baroque violin which she plays tonight. She and cellist, Florence Petit, wittily describe the lightweight bows they both use, as these are more suited to the springier rhythms of these 18th century chamber works, many of them based on dances. Gut-stringed instruments, which we’ve heard often during this Paxton festival in very different repertoire, are, Magdalena assures us, “great to play on,” though they have their inconsistencies. Florence jokes that they might be in tune by the end of the concert.
Trio sonatas of varying lengths make up much of the programme. In these the string players are joined by Mary-Jannet Leith on three different sizes of recorder, and by Thomas Allery, playing continuo on harpsichord, a modern copy of a keyboard from 1637. Handel’s ‘Trio Sonata in F Opus 2 No 4’ is a work from around 1720, which contains many lyrical, almost operatic, passages including a lovely canon in the fourth movement. The final movement is a good- humoured triple-time jig in a stop-start rhythm punctuated by longer notes on the recorder. Elisabetta da Gambarini sang in some of Handel’s oratorios some 20 years later and became the first woman to have her keyboard works published in England. Thomas Allery plays ‘Minuet and Variations’ and the tuneful ‘Cariglion’ from her second collection. Much of Thomas’s time at the harpsichord is spent on the important role of continuo, and it’s good to have his two appearances in the limelight to show us what a fine harpsichord player he is. By the 1740s Scottish music had become popular in London, and the Edinburgh dancing-master James Oswald set up a music business in the Strand in 1741. The first half of the concert ends with his delightful ‘A Sonata of Scots Tunes’ in five movements whose melodies remain toe-tappingly memorable even if their titles are unfamiliar.
Cantabile effects imbue John Blow’s short Sonata which opens the second half. His pupil Henry Purcell’s 1683 ‘Sonata in Three Parts no 2’ is played in an intimate arrangement for strings and recorder without the keyboard. Thomas Allery returns with a second harpsichord solo, ‘Variations on Maggie Lauder’ by Robert Bremner, another Scot, whose music shop set up in 1761 soon attracted custom for his scores and musical instruments from Europe as well as locally. Tonight’s second Handel Sonata was written for flute and violin, and uses its minor key in some darker music, played by Florence on her largest and deepest recorder, a tenor in D, also known as a voice-flute, which also provides impressive flourishes in the fast-moving allegros. Telemann is the only one of tonight’s composers who didn’t visit London, but his bright ‘Trio Sonata’ which ends the programme justifies its place because of his continuing friendship and correspondence with Handel, with whom he shared a love of gardening.
This is a justifiably popular concert with the large audience. These are all splendid musicians, who wear their considerable musical knowledge lightly, and are willing to educate us in a cheerful fashion.
