On Track: Sheffield to Hull and Bach again
5:00AM
Thursday April 03, 2008
By William Dart
One of the rewards of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos is that musicians can constantly uncover new joys and perspectives in their diversities.
Trevor Pinnock has returned to them on a new Avie double CD, a quarter-century after recording what many feel is one of the definitive sets with his English Concert.
The 60-year-old harpsichordist and conductor now sees Bach as a subversive, daring force, enlisting the cr??me de la cr??me of the Early Music set in the European Brandenburg Ensemble to prove his case.
The ensemble, which ranges from 1980s colleague, violist Jane Rogers, to the young Maltese horn player Etienne Cutajar, is juggled around the stage from concerto to concerto, crisply caught in the resonant acoustics of the Sheffield Town Hall Ballroom.
From the bracing instrumental m??lange of the First Concerto, with its nicely pungent Adagio, Pinnock is aiming at the celebratory as much as the cerebral.
Highlights are many.
One is David Blackadder's trumpet soaring atop a striding Second Concerto even if the quartet of the piece's Andante doesn't quite spin the magic that Katy Bircher, Beatrice Hulsemann and Pinnock release in the flute, violin and harpsichord solos of the Fifth Concerto.
