some Bach

I went this evening to hear a performance of J.S Bach's B Minor Mass, performed by the Essex Baroque Orchestra and Psalmody, under the auspices of the Suffolk Villages Festival.  It was originally the idea of a friend, who about two days after I'd agreed to go, contacted me apologetically to say that her family had announced their intention of coming to stay with her for the Bank Holiday weekend, and she wouldn't be able to go after all.

By then I'd got quite keen on the prospect of some live Baroque church choral music.  I went to a Suffolk Villages Festival production a few years back, in Hadleigh, and enjoyed it, though a combination of my disorganisation and the way that their concerts always seemed to fall on weekends when I was working meant I haven't become a regular attendee.  I thought I would go and hear the B Minor Mass anyway.  Running through my list of local friends and acquaintances, and mentally striking out those who didn't like music, didn't like Baroque music, or whose family commitments were such that they wouldn't reliably be free on a Bank Holiday Monday evening, I decided it would be easier simply to go by myself.

The Systems Administrator is not keen on the Baroque, or choral music, and we have long agreed to differ when it comes to classical concerts.  Company can be nice, but inflicting an evening of boredom on someone else, while yours is spoilt because you can see out of the corner of your eye each time they surreptitiously check their watch, is quite pointless.

The concert was held in St Peter's, a redundant church in Sudbury.  It is such a cruel phrase, redundant church.  St Peter's is a handsome building, and Grade I listed, standing on an island site at the top of Market Hill.  It is no longer consecrated for religious purposes, but has found a new role as a cultural venue.  I had not got the hang of the scale of Sudbury, which is a small town, from my earlier examination of the map, and initially walked past St Peter's, before deciding that I could not see any other churches, and that the one at the top of the hill with posters outside was probably the place I was looking for.

The Essex Baroque Orchestra, according to the programme notes, has been going for just over a quarter of a century, and consists of a mixture of professional Baroque specialists, music teachers and experienced amateurs.  I quite like hearing period instruments from time to time, without being wedded to them, and they were interesting to see just after watching Lucy Worsley's history of the Georgians, and reflect that this was close to what her subjects must have known.  Those wooden (?) flutes were presumably similar to whatever it was that Frederick of Prussia played. Somebody pefrormed a horn solo with great aplomb in the first half, but I noticed that she had her coat on and was kissing people goodbye in the interval, so evidently the Symbolum nicenum, Sanctus, and Osanna, Benedictus and Agnus Dei did not include any more horn.

Psalmody were formed for a Hyperion recording in the mid nineties, and have simply kept going. According to the programme notes, it cultivates a forthright, open and word-centered style. Certainly I could hear the words, or at least I could tell where in the programme we'd got to.  The soloists were guest professional singers, but I think perform regularly with Psalmody, or at least some of them do, as I recognised them.

It was jolly nice.  The question now is whether to try my luck with a ticket for Florilegium in late August, when the Festival is putting on a whole flurry of concerts.  I fancy Telemann, Handel, and Vivaldi, and am quite sure the SA doesn't.