MUSIC

St George’s Bristol (Sun 19 Feb)

With Vivaldi’s ‘L’Olimpiade’ about to be unleashed up and down the land in the run-up to London 2012, the OAE seems to have decided to turn the clock back to an earlier Venice – and mark one of the year’s lesser-acknowledged anniversaries: the 400th anniversary of the death of San Marco maestro Giovanni Gabrieli. With a brace of sinuously curved cornetts and glinting sackbutts, the celebration promised plenty of Venetian pomp and circumstance, but in the event it fell short of Gabrielian pure gold. In the first half it was the sweet airborne sounds of gravitationally-free fiddles in the Fontini Sonata for three violins which caught the ear, as did Kirsty Hopkins’s almost erotically sensuous soprano pleading in a setting by Grandi of the ‘Salve Regina’. Ear-grabbing too was Elizabeth Kenny’s animated theorbo embroidery in the continuo accompaniment of Monteverdi’s ‘Exulta Filia’. The Gabrieli canzonas and motets themselves seemed a bit muted (occasionally weighed down even), though in part two sumptuously woven Mass movements galvanised the musicians who, pausing only for a short Marini interlude, powered into an all-guns-blazing ‘Exultet Iam Angelica Turba’, bristling with thrilling salvos and sonorous surprises – La Serenissima red in tooth and claw! (Paul Riley).

Copyright Paul Riley 2012