Last night at the Bavarian State Conservatory there was an evening of
Old Music featuring Emma Kirkby, soprano, and Lars Ulrik Mortensen on the
cemabalo. Ms Kirkby will be known to listers for her performances and
recordings with the Academy of Ancient Music, Consort of Musicke, London
Baroque, Taverner Players, and so on. Last night she and Mortensen
sang/played a mixed program of numbers in German (e.g. Haendel) Italian
(e.g. Scarlatti, Amodei) and English (Purcell, Blow, Maurice Greene,
Boyce). I'd heard her on a few recordings previously, and Mortensen more
often live at the conservatory' where he teaches (though he also tours on
cembbalo, conducts up in Scandinavia and has recorded in his own right).
But to experience Ms Kirkby in person was to experience a new Ms Kirkby.
She's a trim, youngish sprightly thing with a sphynx-like hairdo. Doing
Purcell's _Bess of Bedlam_, "What a sad fate," she imbued this ballad with
body language--a triple hop here, a passage sung kneeling, another on the
floor supported by the right, as if during a Roman banquet. Her voice was
strictly in pitch and impressively controlled. In accord, I think, with
the custom of the age that the program addressed she sang almost without
a tremolo when belting it out, but then shifted into a most fluid of
fluid drives for the figured passages, the trills, the swoops, the fades.
Throughout she was seccurely accompanaied by Mortensen (who also played
some marvellous solos). The audience was a mixture of conservatory
students, faculty, and amateurs. For them Ms Kirkby turned the evening
into one of intimacy, resembling what one is accustomed to in haut
caabaret. It was a smashing success. The students, in particular wouldn't
let the performers cease. There were four encores. (Wish Todd McComb
could have been there!)
Denis Fodor Internet:[log in to unmask]
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