ROBERT King and his group of early music specialists are regular visitors to the RSAMD's Friday lunchtime concert series and as well as enjoying first-class music-making, I'm sure many of the audience are drawn also by King's charismatic commentary to their recitals.
The biggest laugh yesterday came when King suggested that Purcell was a seventeenth-century Andrew Lloyd Webber, though he was quick to indicate that Purcell's popular theatre pieces did attract a better class of audience than Lloyd Webber. The Purcell in question was his Suite from the Gordian Knot Untied, a collection of short movements for string quartet and harpsichord, the players giving grace to the carefully crafted melodic lines and dancing rhythms. Joining the string players were oboist Katharina Spreckelsen and trumpeter Crispian Steele-Perkins, leading instrumentalists in their fields. Spreckelsen chose the oboe d'amore for a transcription of a J S Bach Concerto in A Major, originally for harpsichord. Her intricate fingerwork in the opening Allegro was contrasted in a gorgeous Larghetto, phrases shaped as if sung by the human voice.
Steele-Perkins is the joker of the pack and he unveiled the supposed first-ever trumpet sonata by Maurizio Cazzati. Performing on an eighteenth-century English slide trumpet, he does make a great sound, but this music lacked any charm whatsoever. Better was Steele-Perkins's reconstruction of a trumpet suite based on the music of Handel - Mr Handel's New Waterpieces. Two movements of the Water
Music framed a glorious Saraband from the opera Almira, perfectly executed by violinist Simon Jones.
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