Baroque in the North

I had forgotten to review a short concert I went to by a group called Baroque in the North recently

I have heard them twice before. There are three players – a harpsichordist, a Baroque cello player and someone who successively plays a baroque violin, a recorder and ‘musette’, a kind of bagpipe. They offer an hour – more like an hour and a quarter – of music and then a chance to have a chat and look at the instruments.

The composers were a Baroque mix of Buxtehude, Telemann, Vivaldi, Rameau, and the unknown Daquin, Dupuits, and Finger. As always, in the long term, public appreciation is insightful. There are reasons why some of these names are unknown and why some of the known names are less familiar to some than others……the stars of the show were Vivaldi and Rameau. In an age when composers were like crafts folk, expected to turn out pieces of music in the same way a cobbler might be expected to turn out hand-made shoes, these two have just a bit more sparkle, a bit more of the memorable about their works as played here. I appreciated the solemnity and melancholy of Buxtehude (music after all composed during the Thirty Years War and its aftermath) more than the busyness of Telemann,

All in all an enjoyable hour or so, and very well played too!