Camerata Kilkenny
St John’s Priory, Kilkenny
★★★★☆
The 50th Kilkenny Arts Festival is under way, and the festival has uploaded old programme books to its website. The first concert of the first Kilkenny Arts Week (as it was then called), in 1974, had works by Cima, Legrenzi, Corelli, Couperin, Handel, Rameau and Telemann from an ensemble with the great Ton Koopman on harpsichord. The New Irish Chamber Orchestra played Mozart, Honegger and Haydn under André Prieur, and an all-Bach programme under John Beckett.
There was a song recital by the German baritone Claus Ocker that included songs by Franz Schreker, Igor Stravinsky, Hans Pfitzner and Erich Böhlke. The Irish mezzo-soprano Bernadette Greevy sang Bononcini, Alessandro Scarlatti, Brahms, Seán Ó Riada, Fauré and Duparc, along with Irish arrangements. Dublin’s Consort of St Sepulchre offered music from the 12th to the 17th centuries, and the Irish Youth Orchestra played Vivaldi, Giovanni Gabrieli, Bartók and Dvorak under Hugh Maguire.
A piano recital by Richard Zimdars mixed Mozart and Schubert with works by four 20th-century composers, William Matthews, Henry Cowell, William Bergsma and Aaron Copland. And there were lunchtime concerts by young musicians, including one by Gerald Barry as “young composer of the week”.
Camerata Kilkenny opened this year’s music strand with a Bach-dominated programme, fully in keeping with the spirit of the festival’s founders. The group’s harpsichordist, Malcolm Proud, was actually one of the featured young musicians back in 1974, when he performed in – what else? – an all-Bach programme.
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Camerata Kilkenny’s lunchtime concert at St John’s Priory on Saturday opened with the Trio Sonata from Bach’s Musical Offering. Proud and the viola-da-gamba player Sarah Groser created a rock-solid foundation for the gorgeous, gentle tones of Rachel Beckett’s flute to play intricate imitative games with the much more assertive violin of Maya Homburger.
The British soprano Zoë Brookshaw was the soloist in three arias from Bach cantatas and two songs by Henry Purcell. She has a very attractive voice but did not show the control of words and agility of vocal line to bring out the best in the music. Unusually for a native English speaker, she was more persuasive in Bach than in Purcell.
The finest music-making came in two solos, Proud’s slow, inexorable recursive swell of Couperin’s La Favorite, and Homburger’s shining performance in favourite territory, the Passacaglia from Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, a virtuosic peak of 17th-century music, which she played with mesmerising command.
