Ensemble Hesperi – Early Music ensemble – Scunthorpe and North Lincolnshire Concert Society

Audience comments:
– Lovely musicians and a varied and interesting programme. Good to hear a quartet for a change.
– Very good concert – I would like to hear more Baroque music, please.
– All thoroughly enjoyable – great entertainment not only to listen but also to watch!
– Delightful concert
– Superb performance, well suited to the size of venue. More early music please!
– Excellent! Particulalry lovely to hear some early music and some less familiar composers.
– The physicality of the musicians creates a wonderful sound, but must be exhausting!
– Wonderful concert, wonderful musicians. Thank you.
– Virtuosity with elegance and delicate emotion – a delight. More of this please.
– My sort of music!! Such dexterity and clarity.
– Wonderful music, very expressive. Loved the energy, dynamism and enthusiasm.
– I don’t normally like this sort of music but I’ve had a wonderful evening. What skill and talent these young people have!

Review by Clive Davies

Is it that time of year again? It may well be, since a most melodious greetings card has just been opened.
Addressed to the audience at the Scunthorpe and North Lincolnshire Concert Society, it was delivered in person to the Outwood Academy, Foxhills. The card depicted a bustling street scene in London Town.Specifically, this was a street scene centred about the Strand, that most fashionable of thoroughfares, from which radiated a starburst of books, ideas, words and music in the dawning era of the Hanoverians.

An inscription on the card invoked “Handel in the Strand”, and there indeed was an early glimpse of Handel himself with his Trio Sonata in F major. But there were many other familiar faces (and some entirely unfamiliar) to be glimpsed going about their business of making music. An age of to-ing and fro-ing and rumbustious confusion, but happily there were expert guides on hand to lead the way back in time and place. Members of the Ensemble Hesperi – young, personable, highly talented and companionable – presented a programme of works by luminaries and lesser mortals from the candle-lit Age of Baroque.

Many in the audience agreed that this was a first acquaintance with some of the composers represented. Yet what a pleasure it was, for example, to meet the harpsichord “lesson” played by Thomas Allery and written by Elisabetta de Gambarini, the first female composer to print and publish her keyboard music. Italians, Germans and Scots, all nationalities, were drawn to the musical metropolis, and all were brightly served by Magdalena Loth-Hill on baroque violin, Florence Petit on Baroque cello and Mary Jennet Leith on her three recorders.

Members of the ensemble played with crisp and cohesive vivacity, their achievements informed by an all-embracing enthusiasm and commitment. Each in turn introduced their instruments and summarised some of the quirks and idiosyncracies to be negotiated in playing originals and replicas. (Hats off to the sheep’s intestines.) The group’s dedication was demonstrated further during the interval when the players stood down their instruments and mingled with the concertgoers.

The concert traced the outlines of a century of music making, with a rich selection of airs, dances, variations and sonatas. It concluded with the Hersperi arrangement of pieces intended originally for organ or clavecin. These were occasional pieces, written to celebrate Noel. There, not a snowman or a Robin Redbreast in sight, yet it turns out to be that time of year again – and very pleasing it was too.