So diverse were the musical offerings and so varied were the playing styles at Sligo's sixth Festival of Baroque Music that it would be idle to attempt a definition; suffice it to say that it was the favoured music of the cultivated classes in the 17th and 18th centuries both in Britain and Europe. The Russians, eager to establish a place in the musical hierarchy, paid large sums of money to entice Italian musicians and composers to the east, and two of the festival's concerts were an illustration of this.
Treata, a trio of musicians from Latvia, opened the weekend of music with a programme that might have been heard in Riga and St Petersburg, including familiar names like Telemann and Rameau, but also a Sonata in C by Bortniansky, best known for his arrangement of Russian sacred music.
This work, for harpsichord solo, gave a hint of the way the national school would develop, and may have owed something to a fascinating descriptive piece, Le Vertigo, also for harpsichord, by JPN Royer.
Schmelzer's witty elaboration of bird-song, Cucu, for recorder and continuo, showed the group enjoying an unusual degree of freedom in matters of ensemble, and the individual members - baroque flute, harpsichord and gamba - were at their best in solos.
The Russian theme, under the title of The Court of Catherine the Great: the Italian Connection, was presented with equal excitement, but more control and general concord, by an unnamed group of Eleanor Dawson (flute), Clare Salaman (violin), Daniel Yeadon (cello), and Katharine May (harpsichord).
Vivaldi was the best known of their composers; a spirited rendering of his Variations on La Folia ended a recital which included two sets of variations on Russian folksongs by Trutovsky and Khandoshkin, and a movement from that same sonata by Bortniansky.
Dawson's group was the only one not to include a viola da gamba. The Little Consort, directed by Sarah Cunningham, consisted of three gambas and a theorbo; and in their late-night recital, their joint sound, in works by Locke and Marais, generated an atmosphere of unequalled passion and refinement which embraced audience as well as players.
Cunningham, with Sarah Groser, played some short pieces for two lyra viols by Thomas Ford, whose rich chording showed why the lyra viola was so popular in its heyday; with Nick Milne she played a tempestuous piece for two bass viols by Marais, both players vying in virtuosity. Richard Sweeney, on the theorbo, added a sharpness of definition in the parts he played, and in a solo by Robert de VisΘe proved himself no mean master of the instrument.
David Adams (harpsichord), introducing the Christ Church Baroque Chamber Ensemble - Sarah Moffat (violin), Mark Wilkes (gamba) - in a lunchtime concert of rather later music by Muffat, Buxtehude and Krieger, quoted a commentator who said that the form of Divisions, once the rage, had become "abhorrent" and a less rigid, more free-rangingly inventive style was required.
A telling example of open form was Froberger's Suite XX in D for harpsichord; Adams played a few bars exactly as written, and then as it might or indeed should have been played, and the contrast was striking. It could be that notation had yet to catch up with practice.
In another lunchtime recital, Malcolm Proud (harpsichord) concentrated on early English baroque keyboard music, Byrd and Philips, with a charming piece by Sweelinck based on an English folk-tune. From the intellectual rigour of My Ladye Nevels Grownde to the rambunctious fun of La Volta, Proud enthralled his listeners.
