The Glasgow Barons: Early Music Festival
The Glasgow Barons: Early Music Festival
Govan Old Parish Church, Glasgow
Behind Govan Old, now a reliquary of engraved monuments from Glasgow’s very earliest days rather than a place of worship, where the Govan Ferry once plied, a new footbridge across the Clyde is taking shape, linking the ancient origins of the city with its trendier modern barrios of Finnieston and the West End.
That bridge is emblematic of the partnership between The Glasgow Barons, the musical initiative of Paul MacAlindin, and the University of Glasgow across the river, which nurtured many of the musicians who featured in the first festival of early music in the city for 30 years or more. The senior figure was John Butt, Gardiner Professor of Music at the university and artistic director of the Dunedin Consort, who brought a quartet – possibly the ensemble’s smallest-ever iteration – to the festival on Saturday night.
Friday evening’s programme of vocal music – to which the building is eminently well-suited – was provided by musicians who met studying at Glasgow: an octet, Cantus Firmus, and the four-piece iuchair Ensemble, whose appearance last summer in Govan had inspired this festival weekend.
Warwick Edwards and the Scottish Early Music Consort established an early music festival in Glasgow in the 1990s, but the city dropped the ball while the era went on to top the classical charts regularly and, especially in the Jonathan Mills years, move centre-stage at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Audiences at Govan Old suggested an appetite to be filled, and a varied menu was provided by this first festival. The top attraction of three chamber music concerts was the Saturday evening performance by the Dunedin: flautist Katy Bricher, violinist Huw Daniel and Lucia Capellaro on viola da gamba and cello joining Butt at the harpsichord.
In a sense, their programme was a “sampler album” of music the Consort has championed in recent years. Notably that meant the inclusion of the Violin Sonata No 1 by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, the French composer whose Biblical cantatas featured in the Out of her Mouth concerts last summer, and Telemann’s Paris Quartet No 1, nodding towards the Leipzig 300 programme earlier this year. Music by Bach and Handel – including a lovely encore showcasing Bircher – completed the recital.
Bach was the most up-to-date of the composers in the programme by organist Andrew Forbes that followed, but his informative sequence was about how Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Sweelinck, Muffat and Scheidt were heard in more recent times – and a compelling case for the instrument in Govan Old, which has been maintained but requires a proper overhaul.
On Friday evening, the last-minute reversal of the Cantus Firmus programme was entirely to its benefit, with a fuller account of a mass by Nicolas Gombert in the first half and the mix of Mexican and Spanish renaissance polyphony after the interval, culminating in the most familiar music of Tomas Luis de Victoria.
The male voice quartet that started it all, iuchair Ensemble, delivered the earliest and most original singing, however. On the feast day of St Anne, they recreated the plainchant of the 12th century, with some ornamentation of their own – some of it composed by tenor Joshua Stutter.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Dunedin Consort by Campbell David Parker