IT used to be the musical equivalent of brown rice and sandals but nowadays it has become pretty much the norm: if you're doing 18th century music, you do it on 18th century instruments.
And here's the kind of sound you get. "A feeling of weight and release; a lightness of texture; an agility in the bowing and high definition articulation when required. The baroque bow is used like a brush stroke.
Seamus Crimmins - who is, with a nationwide tour of Opera Theatre Company's Amadigi opening at the Theatre Royal in Wexford tonight, about to embark on his third tour of duty as a conductor of Handel opera - fairly chortles at the idea that he might be an expert in 18th century "authentic" performance style. But he can't disguise his enthusiasm for the nitty gritty of baroque phrasing.
It's all about working within small units, not broad sweeps of phrase. Handel's clients - the aristocracy - were highly cultivated people both in their dress sense and in their sense of manners and behaviour and so on. And I think this music reflects the delicacy of gesture, the refinement of movement prevalent in 18th century society."
For this tour Opera Theatre Company has assembled a small but select orchestra which calls itself the London Baroque Concertino and whose members have played with various period instrument ensembles - the London Classical Players, the Droftingholm Court Orchestra in Sweden, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Los Arts Florissants.
It is a measure of the company's increasing expertise in such matters that this production of Amadigi has been invited not only to the Edinburgh Festival but also to the BOC Covent Garden Festival in London and, as the main presentation, to the Buxton Opera Festival in June.
The orchestra's wind players will play on modern instruments but all the string players says Seamus Crimmins, wild use baroque instruments, wrenched upwards to achieve the pitch levels to which Irish singers are accustomed. "Do you know about the baroque bow? Instead of curving outwards like a modern bow it's concave, so that as you apply more pressure you weaken the tension, giving a more linear attack - it's not a `zinc' but a more affectionate approach to the sound..."
For somebody who came to Handel via directing a choir in his native Co Down, the Dun Laoghaire Choral Society - which he also founded - and a mixed bag of musicals, including The Sound of Music and West Side Story, Seamus Crimmins seems to have absorbed vast amounts of detailed information about 18th century instrumentation and style. "I just learned a bit, listening and discussing and watching how others do it," he protests. In his non Handelian incarnations commissioning editor at RTE's FM 3, he obviously has access to all sorts of recordings; he also sat in on a "revelatory" rehearsal session with John Eliot Gardiner, one of the doyens of the "authentic" performance movement. "It was wonderful. They did such playful things with the bow..."
Playful is the very word to apply to Amadigi itself: written for four of the most spectacular of the Italian singers of Handel's day, it combines the most delightfully frivolous of Handel's dance based rhythms with an intensely dramatic examination of the theme of unrequited love. Jonathan Peter Kenny and Anne O'Byrne are the good guys - they make it, by the skin of their teeth, to the happy ever after - with Majella Cullagh as the wicked witch Melissa and Buddug Verona James as the dastardly Prince Dardano. James Conway directs, with designs by Neil Irish and lighting by Simon Corder. After its performance in Wexford tonight the show begins an Irish tour (see listing for dates and venues), with the London Baroque Concertino giving additional recitals of 18th century orchestral music in Lismore, Sligo, Omagh and Boyle.
