Camerata Kilkenny (or Kilkenny Camerata - Kilkenny Arts Festival's printed material offers both names) is an obvious outcome of having a number of leading baroque players based in the Kilkenny area. For the last concert of festival on Sunday, group members John Elwes (tenor), Maya Homburger (violin), Malcolm Proud (harpsichord) and Barry Guy (double bass) were joined by friends from across the water for a programme of Bach and Vivaldi at St Canice's Cathedral.
A candle-bedecked stage was atmospherically lit by Paul Keogan, who blithely ignored anyone's need or interest in reading the supplied text and translation of the Bach cantata on the programme. Happily the music-making had about it something special to match the care of the visual presentation, and managed to be functional too.
Flautist Rachel Brown refreshingly dispensed with the woozy swelling and fading which can be such a feature of baroque flute playing. In Bach's G major Trio Sonata, BWV1038, and the Suite in B minor, she held a firm line, and communicated with clear and often distinctive rhetoric.
In Vivaldi's Oboe Concerto in A minor, RV461, Marcel Ponseele, shared the same sort of unforced assertiveness and welcome freedom of mannerism. Well, almost. He yielded rather more than Brown to the temptation of vibrato. In Bach's Cantata No 55, Ich armer Mensch, ich Sundenknecht (A poor wretch am I, a slave of sin), tenor John Elwes caught with piercing intensity the sinner's pleadings for mercy and forgiveness. And in Bach's A minor Violin Concerto, Maya Homburger was a light, lithe soloist, balancing with, rather than against the one-to-a-part band in a way that completely freed the music from the conventional stereotypes of romantic opposition.
