Mrs Krishnan’s Party hilarious
Mentioned in despatches:
Twice in 24 hours, I experienced music remarkable for its technical purity, its beauty and its ability to move the spirit.
You couldn’t have heard sounds like these in the old Founders, folks, but in some churches, they are the ultimate musical counter to the two-chord bang bang of commercial radio. Traditionally, churches have interior height and consequent airspace, allowing sound to bounce around, creating its own echoes and resonances.
The greater the height and space, the better the sound, and Hamilton has two of these: the Gallagher Concert Chamber, and the venue for a musical delight from the choir of Southwell School as they sang a traditional choral eucharist at St Peter’s Cathedral on Sunday morning. On Sunday night, in the same space, baroque soprano Jane Tankersley invested Buxtehude’s Sicut Moses with a vibrancy which brought the 17th-century cantata right into our 21st century consciousness with a beauty, passion, and technical elegance, which was unreal. keyless in Hamilton.
The bassoon, like the other instruments, changed notes through fingering, not keying, and the different timbres which resulted for different notes were intentionally exploited by the composers who wrote for the instruments.
Part of the surprise was in the way these instruments, with their strangely anachronistic voices, incorporated the range of human responses, now winsome and delicate, then deep and mysterious, now abandoned, then full of passion and beauty.
Time lost meaning. This music was ageless.
An oddly unexpected pleasure was the presence of 30 or 40 latent musicians who, when other kids would be out for a lark, were not only absorbed in the music but turning the Zefiro six into heroes and templates which will be the dynamic propelling many of them into high-quality performance themselves.
This was a performance where to watch was to smile, to listen was to dance, and to dance was to live.