Our choice

We travel with an eye on jazz and classical music and museums. Our searches hadn’t found too much classical of interest in the few days we were here. It’s a common problem to find we’ve just missed something interesting. We missed a Russian Orchestra in London then in Edinburgh playing Rach 2. That’s one I recently played and one I’d like to hear. Then there was the inevitable conflict. Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Usher Hall playing … Bolero … or a renowned and sublime period chamber group featuring a friend, Cecilia Bernadini. No contest really. Cecilia had stayed with us for the last CIMF so it would be great to catch up. The Dunedin Consort was playing Biber and the like in a lovely intimate theatre (audience 220) with its own instrument museum and conservator just around the corner from the Jazz Bar. All perfect. In the end, Cecilia was playing violin for opera in Paris and the group was a small incarnation (6 players) but the concert was excellent and everyone amiable. We’d even visited a few of the bars around Cowgate/Niddry St that had caught our eye (Stramash and Whistle Binkies and Bannerman’s, all local live music bars of a different style) so we were readied. The concert was in St Cecilia’s Hall run by the University of Edinburgh. The program centred on Georg Muffatt, Savoy-born of Scottish parentage, and his work to combine Italian, French and German styles in 5-part writing (here 5 strings plus harpsichord). The other composers were Navara, Biber, Rosenmuller and Schmelzer. The performers were 2 violins, 2 violas, cello and harpsichord with a few smaller combinations for some works. The musicology was beyond me but the expressive tones of gut, the awareness between players, the canons and variations that featured in some works were clear, even a revelation. These were impressive and authentic players. But they are also informal and exploratory. DC commissions and plays work by living composers and they aim to “make music relevant to the present day”. It’s early music but it was authoritative, expressive, closely performed with a leader (first violin) prominent and expressive, his second violin responsive and variant, playful ad bouncy (not least when picturing animals in the Biber Sonata representativa), the lower strings more solid, firm through to cello at the bass end. I noticed and often followed cello, for his firm, solid lines and mirrored canons, tightly spelt and perfectly intoned, with just occasional expressive vibrato. I love how vibrato can just spell moments of pause and contemplation as this here. The harpsichord was there but never too obvious: it’s like that. The musos hung around at the end so I could chat with Jonathan on cello and gawk at the violin peg-end with face in place of scroll (Stainer 1658). So, no Cecilia but a stunning period concert and with pleasant intimacy. BTW, the Dunedin Consort have won numerous awards (incl. two Gramophones), are based in Edinburgh, date from 1995, are led by John Butt and are named after Din Eidyn, the ancient Celtic name for Edinburgh Castle.

Dunedin Consort performed at St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh. Performers were Matthew Truscott and Tuomo Suni (violins), Alfonso Leal del Ojo and Raquel Massadas (violas), Jonathan Manson (cello) and Tom Foster (harpsichord).