Lammermuir Festival reviews: I Fagiolini | Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective
I Fagiolini’s Lammermuir Festival performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas blended vocal and instrumental beauty with the group’s trademark disarming humour, writes David Kettle
I Fagiolini: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, St Mary’s Church, Haddington ★★★★
The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Dirleton Kirk ★★★★
Put Purcell’s short opera Dido and Aeneas on a programme, I Fagiolini’s director Robert Hollingworth quipped, and concert promoters are delighted. It was a discovery borne out by the capacity crowd that filled St Mary’s Church in Haddington for the esteemed ensemble’s frankly exquisite performance, simply but effectively staged, which blended vocal and instrumental beauty with the group’s trademark disarming humour.
Julia Doyle made for an imperious but vulnerable Dido, her closing Lament simply spinetingling in its purity and emotional directness, while Rowan Pierce’s hectoring Belinda was amusingly impatient with her Queen’s vacillations, and Frederick Long strutted around convincingly as an ultimately somewhat wounded Aeneas. As for humour – well, if pig noses and googly eyes weren’t enough for the opera’s cackling witches, then there was even a literal visual quote from Hollingworth’s beloved Monty Python.
Despite the opera’s vivid insights, however, you got the feeling that Hollingworth’s real love was for the “best-of” collection of Purcell snippets he’d brought together before the interval, songs and instrumental movements excised from bigger stage works that showed the full ambition and sometimes pioneering experimentalism of the composer’s achievements.
They were played and sung with exceptional insight – and showed off the gritty vigour of I Fagiolini’s four string players as well as the intricate sweetness of Eligio Quinteiro’s chitarrone – but they could maybe do with being strung together more fluidly and convincingly as a set.
I Fagiolini’s bracing all-Purcell extravaganza followed a sumptuous afternoon chamber concert of French music from the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective in Dirleton Kirk, focused around the honeyed but strongly defined flute playing of Adam Walker. Pretty much unknown music by Bonis, Gaubert and Duruflé were real discoveries, but Walker’s buoyant, agile and heartfelt Poulenc Flute Sonata clearly captured the spirit of a wandering toddler from the audience, who stood in open-mouthed awe before the performers. Another typically eclectic but deeply rewarding Lammermuir day.
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