The programme was drawn from the golden era of Venetian music, that is to say around the time of the golden era of English drama. A time when the Venetian composers - at least one of whom was actually a German - were experimenting with part music, the parts being taken by varying combinations of voice and instrument - the instruments being the organ, the sackbuts and the cornetts offered on this occasion.
By way of a change we sat quite near the front, which worked well most of the time, when most of the music was coming from in front of us, not so well when it was more spread around the church. The console for the organ was more or less immediately in front of us, while the pipes were in the gallery at the back of the church, leading me to wonder how much lag there was between pressing a key and getting a tone back from the back of the church. Enough, I would have thought, for the organist to be aware of it. With a big lag being bad, weakening the link between the fingers and the sounds. Clearly a matter on which to press an organist, should I ever get into conversation with one.
The concert was well up to the Ripieno's usual standard, rather better perhaps as we rather liked the programme.
There was a compromise on the clapping front with no clapping between the pieces before the interval, with clapping after. A reasonable compromise between the no-clappers - this group including myself - and the clappers.
I got into rather a muddle about sackbuts and cornetts on the way home, a muddle eventually resolved by google. These instruments were all wind, mostly brass and looking rather like small trombones, with a few vaguely oboe like instruments, tapered and bent, without the complicated keys of the modern instrument. First thought was that a cornett was a sort of small trumpet, so that must be the trombones. Second thought was that maybe a cornett was something to do with horns, the sort of thing than ancient Germans blew in the woods when out hunting boar, or maybe used to drink from at the feast following. Perhaps these particular horns were from animals grown especially for their long horns, slightly bent rather than very bent in the way of a cow or a bull. After a few false starts, google came up with a picture of various ancient instruments and from that lead I was able to establish that the bent oboe was indeed the cornett.
Had I looked more carefully at the picture by Praetorius offered by the programme, I might have worked out rather faster that in the beginning it was all horns. Evolution took place along two axes, one to do with the material from which the horn was made, the other to do with the way in which one varied the tone when one got tired of doing this my mouth alone. Eventually getting to the modern oboe made of wood and with its fancy keys, the modern trombone with its slide and the modern trumpet with its valves. The Venice of this concert was clearly still at the ammonite stage.
While our Royal Trumpeters stick with the old ways, the Royals being a heritageful bunch, and still do it all by mouth, even now.
The whole sponsored in part by a company called Accuracy, a company which looks to have risen from the ashes of the late lamented Arthur Anderson. Accuracy express some of their community spirit by support for the Ectodermal Dysplasia society, with this unpleasant sounding ailment being a large family of disorders mainly, but not exclusively affecting hair, teeth and sweat glands, bits of us which are linked by both their evolutionary and their embryological heritage.
PS: the apprentice conductor deserves a mention in dispatches. She might be very young, but she is clearly going places. Neither conductor, incidentally, used a stick.
Reference 1: http://www.meridiansinfonia.com/Meridian_Sinfonia.html.
Reference 2: http://www.accuracy.com/.
Reference 3: http://www.ectodermaldysplasia.org/.
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