Red Priest wacky and brilliant
Red Priest – The Baroque Bohemians
Michael Fowler Centre, March 25 Reviewed by John Button
The four musicians who make up Red Priest use baroque music as the thematic starting point for their performances. But that tells us only so much about what they actually do.
They are wacky musicians who just happen to be virtuoso practitioners on their instruments.
They are a mess of intriguing contradictions in which baroque works are both mangled yet enlightening; where improvisation is consistently suggested yet practised precision is the reality, where humour abounds both with anecdotes and in the playing.
There are four players in Red Priest. Piers Adams is the virtuoso recorder player on his bevy of instruments (I suspect one or two might be of his own design), Adam Summerhayes, the flashing fingered violinist who also plays on strange other instruments, Angela East, the brilliant cellist and David Wright, the superb harpsichordist.
Together they use as a starting point a number of wellknown baroque composers (Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi), less-known (Biber, Canpra) and unknown (Miekczewski, Nicholson) plus two anonymous composers as the basis for rambling rhapsodies by Summerhayes.
The most revealing thing about the Red Priest approach is, even with sneaky references to modern musicians, is just how baroque it all sounds, and, in a way, this outrageously free approach may just be more authentic than the more grimly ‘‘true’’ approach of many an authentic instrument group.
Some people may not like Red Priest but, judging by the enthusiastic reception, there were not many present at this concert.