The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin is a fine part of the Sydney Festival’s classical music programme for 2014. This busy participant is performing Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas five times in collaboration with Sasha Waltz.
In the middle of Dido and Aeneas‘s run, this joyous virtuosi ensemble also shares early music classics and other interesting works with a captive audience.
Employing vibrant tempi, as well as incredible soft expressive tones, the ensemble members in solo or group roles thrill the Festival crowd with period-instrument versions of key composers’ works.
Photo by Jamie Williams
The concert is very accessible and of consistently high standard. It illustrates how early music events can evolve in to vigorous and touching concert experiences, especially at the hands, hearts and heads of global leaders such as this group.
Treats for the audience come in the form of concertmaster Georg Kallweit’s version of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor BWV 1041. This solo part contains novel, albeit successful, flexibility of tempo and technical showmanship to rival a concerto from any period.
This sensation is augmented by the well-known double violin concerto later in the programme. Soloists and accompnying ensemble dialogue well and deliver the intricate music in broad strokes.
The remainder of the programme is filled with familiar and crisp Vivaldi, a lesser known but dramatic church sonata by Caldara, and an innovative staging of Geminiani’s take on La Follia, a favourite of the early music composers.
The work of percussionist Michael Metzler, and the inimitable character of early guitars and lutes, is yet another gift to both Festival newcomers and established followers of this genre alike.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
Concertmaster and solo violin: Georg Kallweit
Solo violin: Elfa Run Kristinsdottir
City Recital Hall, Angel Place
Sydney Festival
www.sydneyfestival.org.au
18 January
