Ibocs/Huggett

Christ Church, Dublin

The Irish Baroque Orchestra has more than one formation. There’s also the smaller Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists, a group of core players that focuses on chamber music, and stretches to one-to-a-part performances of baroque concertos.

Both the IBO proper and the IBOCS have already appeared on CD, and the IBOCS's just-finished short tour of Dublin, Sligo and Clifden featured music from the group's recent Flights of Fantasyalbum, on the Avie label.

The album was an Italian-flavoured affair, well represented in the touring programme through pieces by Biagio Marini, Antonio Bertali and, best of all, three sonatas by Dario Castello, especially the Sonata Seconda, which the violinist Monica Huggett played with a real sense of impromptu fervour, dashing and dallying in a way that made the music’s every whim sound persuasive.

Henry Purcell's fantasia Three Parts on a Groundblends regular patterning with a melodic inventiveness that is so independent and so rich that the music seems completely unimpeded by the recursiveness on which it is built. The IBOCS's performance took full delight in its scrunchy dissonances and scurrying virtuosity.

The programme included three big names of the baroque. Bach’s Concerto in D for Three Violins (a reconstruction from an existing harpsichord concerto) provided a rich grounding at the end of the first half of an evening in which a lot of the music was concerned with flightiness of one kind or another.

Pachelbel’s famous Canon, for once paired with its original Gigue, opened the second half. Vivaldi’s Concerto in F for Three Violins, which closed the concert, presented the evening’s one not-quite-solid performance. On this occasion the effect was more that of a rough diamond than of a polished gem.