"THE Four Seasons by Candlelight" is an event for our times. An accurate description would be - "Good musicians play Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, directed from the harpsichord and dressed in 18th-century clothes; but they play modern instruments.
The playing owes something to contemporary historical performance practice; but it is close enough to the style of Nigel Kennedy's best-selling, very un-historic recording, for the audience to feel at home. Candelabra are on the stage; but there is enough modern lighting for the musicians to read the music and the audience to read the programme notes; so nobody will suffer the fate of Bach and Handel, and go blind."
I very much doubt if, 20 years ago, this idea would have filled 26 venues across Britain and Ireland, including matinee and evening performances at the National Concert Hall.
In fact, Saturday night's concert included some engaging music making. The Mozart Festival Orchestra, directed by Ian Watson, gave a vigorous, though sometimes scrappy performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3.
Crispian Steele-Perkins is one of the world's best players Ion the natural (historical) trumpet, and he played beautifully in music by Jeremiah Clarke and John Stanley, albeit on a modern valve trumpet. He and Edward Hobart were less persuasive in Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Trumpets, as if nobody was sure what to do other than rattle off the notes. Soprano Eirian Davies sang two oratorio arias by Handel in a dramatic and absorbing way.
David Juritz was the superb soloist in The Four Seasons. ,In exploiting every opportunity for the dramatic, the performance played havoc with Vivaldi's directions and with Baroque rhetorical concepts. But the brass-necked extremity of everything was gripping.
"The Four Seasons by Candlelight" is a conceptual rag-bag. Yet parts of Saturday's concert were more rewarding, than some purist concerts of 17th-and 18th-century music I have heard.
