arts
Enlightened Hovingham
Yorkshire is a big county and Ryedale but a small part of it, but this beautiful parcel of North Yorkshire certainly has a place of prominence in the cultural landscape.
Hot on the heels of the York Festival of Early Music comes the Ryedale Festival, running concurrently for a time with the Burton Agnes Jazz Festival. Truly there is a wealth of things to see and hear in these parts.
It began on Friday, 12th July, in Lastingham, with a morning performance of the first great English opera, Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, followed in the evening by a triple concert at Castle Howard. On Saturday, the acclaimed saxophonist, Jess Gillam, gave a recital in St Peter’s Church, Norton.
The weekend culminated in Hovingham Hall, a beautifully Palladian building perfect for a night of Baroque, with a return visit from the Orchestra of the Age Of Enlightenment. Formed in 1986, they are the resident orchestra of the Southbank Centre, London, with close associations with, not least, Glyndebourne Festival Opera. A little larger on this occasion than a chamber-scale ensemble, they treated the audience to five pieces by JS Bach.
Hovingham Hall
The OAE does not have a principal conductor and the leadership when the orchestra is performing elsewhere is commonly shared between three musicians, one of whom, violinist Matthew Truscott, concertmaster of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, made a bravura contribution to Bach’s Concerto for two violins in the unusually contemplative key of D Minor - that the composer also used in his incomplete work The Art of Fugue. (It is, of course, also that of Beethoven's Ninth.)
Most of the works dated from when Bach was Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, writing very largely for the court, at the end of the first decade of the eighteenth-century and beginning of the following. A happy, productive period, Bach wrote some of his most light-hearted pieces while seeming to retain a nobly rigid structure. The concert featured the first two of the four orchestral suites, both of which begin with stately overtures before gaining pace and lightness, capturing the spirit of dance.
The Violin Concerto Number Two was a joyous thing, spiralling into life with a rising triad ushering in the most beautiful of melodies. The Adagio seemed to cast a spell over the Riding School which was at capacity. Afterwards everyone streamed out into the sunshine during the intermission and, on the day that England had won the Cricket World Cup, some strolled over to the wicket of this most beautiful of cricket grounds, contemplating the green and the pleasant - and wondering if it might take turn.
Though relatively small in number, this version of the OAE was full of vivacity and sparkle and lost nothing of the composer’s immensely rich orchestral textures. It was a wonderfully enlightened night.
The Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment appeared at Hovingham Hall, on Sunday, 14th July.