National Gallery, Dublin
Twenty-four top concertos – Vivaldi’s Op 8, Handel’s Op 3 and Bach’s Brandenburgs – in six concerts spread over 13 days: that’s the audacious schedule for the Irish Baroque Orchestra’s Masterworks series at the National Gallery.
The risks of such resolute programming are certainly paying off, with the audience at the penultimate concert showing no symptoms whatsoever of concerto fatigue. While the format of two Vivaldis, one Handel plus one Bach might be growing humdrum, this music never could.
If the unusual intensity of such a series means that the orchestra isn’t going to be heard consistently at its best, that showed in some infelicitous balances and a tendency for the ever-present drive to slip into overdrive.
The continuo-free slow movement of Vivaldi’s famous Spring Concerto, for example, overplayed the required contrast between violins and viola bass, while Andreas Helm’s willowy oboe cantilena in the largo of Vivaldi’s Op 8 No 5 had to compete with the musicianly yet predominant theorbo continuo of Richard Sweeney.
As violin soloist in the Spring Concerto, the IBO’s director, Monica Huggett, was as energetic as ever – if not quite as polished. The first movement’s birdsong effects were injected with perhaps a little more realism than the music could take, while the group rubatos that are the hallmark of Huggett’s performances had an atypically strategised feel.
In Brandenburg Concerto No 5, harpsichordist Malcolm Proud whipped up the first movement’s iconic cadenza into a frenzied coloratura, while in the second movement the co-operation of Claire Duff on violin and Julia Corry on transverse flute was especially beguiling.
On this occasion, though, it was Handel’s pithy Concerto Grosso Op 3 No 6 that drew from the IBO its most tonally unified and contagiously rhythmic playing.
