VoxCarnyx

Adelaide Place, Glasgow

The Dunedin Consort has been a unique part of the Scottish musical landscape for three decades now, not always in its current format as a flexible, all-encompassing Baroque ensemble capable of mixing and matching its instrumental and vocal resources to order. Nor has it escaped the occasional threat of extinction in the face of funding wrangles. That’s all in the past. Today’s Dunedin is well and truly fit for purpose, with a performance strategy that combines world-leading scholarship, tip-top performance standards, international prominence and award-winning recognition.

That applies even to the most intimate of presentations, such as Thursday’s French Connection programme (repeated Friday in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk), which featured a mere four players led by American guest harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, charged with tracing the seminal evolution of instrumental chamber music across the first half of the 18th century.

It amounted to a glowingly affectionate and eminently stylish musical soirée. The visual intimacy of these performances was matched by an easeful conversational interaction among the players – Gordis joined by Matthew Truscott (violin), Jonathan Manson (viola da gamba) and Rosie Bowker (flute). A quintessentially restrained and collaborative virtuosity, besides resonating with the simple soft-lit ambiance of this former baptist church venue, connected meaningfully with an assortment of illustrative pieces by Bach, Telemann, Rameau and the earliest of the featured composers, one Elisabeth Jaquet de la Guerre.

La Guerre’s Trio Sonata in B flat, despite dating from 1695, bore clear signs of where the forthcoming half-century was heading, its bright and breezy opening punctuated by quirky rhythmic hemiola, later tempered by deliciously deviant chromaticism. It followed Rameau’s Premiere Concert from his 1741 Pièces de clavecin en concerts, a thing of refinement if more of a slow burner than his Cinquième Concert that was later to close the programme.

That later Rameau’s liberating use of the viola da gamba, Manson now free to indulge in pungent double stopping and explore the topmost extremes of his instrument, proved a powerfully dramatic summation to the Bach and Telemann that preceded it. In Bach’s Trio Sonata from The Musical Offering, besides being the most substantial work in the programme, Gordis and her team dug deep into its polyphonic complexities and chromatic ambiguities. The musical interchange, refined yet movingly expressive, was as instinctive as it was disciplined.

Bach’s Trio Sonata in C major (organists will know it in its solo version for that instrument) provided a lithe opening to the concert’s second half, its slow movement tinged with neatly-aligned sensuousness. Then to Telemann’s Paris Quartet, an intriguing complement, suggesting perhaps that – of the two composers – he may have been much more of a party animal than Bach. A performance that fully embraced its whimsy, its menagerie of brightly-lit counterpoint, its exploration of instrumental freedom, its joie-de-vivre, was a potent reminder of Telemann’s equal standing in the fiercely-competitive German High Baroque.

If anything, this was a presentation that could perhaps have done with a little more informality, some words (Gordis spoke briefly once) to further contextualise the music. Then again, these inspired performances (let’s just forget the momentary confusion that led to one player starting the wrong piece) had plenty to say by themselves.

Ken Walton