Vache Baroque is a relatively new professional group aimed at attracting a younger audience for Baroque music. They aim to offer inventive programming of spoken text alongside instrumental, choral and solo music, whether familiar or unfamiliar, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is a wholly laudable and compassable aim given the huge swathes of Baroque music out there that is highly dramatic in character organised around the depictions of challenges and dilemmas that are all too recognisable in modern terms. If Caravaggio and Artemisia and other Baroque artists can be a success with all age groups, then why not the music of the same era, exemplified in this case by Jan Dismas Zelenka?
But ‘Baroque and Roll’, this evening is not. The texts and music are in the main dark and gloomy, indeed ‘pitched past pitch of grief’ in some cases. The intricately planned programme contains three guiding threads all linked to psalm 130 – De Profundis – one of the most memorable cries of grief in religious literature and appropriate for the season of Lent. Movements of Bach’s 1724 setting are performed alongside the equally memorable contemporaneous setting by the Bohemian composer Zelenka, and a plethora of shorter instrumental and choral pieces from Purcell to Brahms. Interleaved throughout are sections from Oscar’s Wilde’s famous 1897 letter from prison which also bears the same title. In these extracts Wilde reflects on the circumstances that led to his downfall and incarceration, and inhabits loneliness, isolation and despair in language of self-lacerating precision and huge humane understanding, but still including the possibility of humour.
Musical director Jonathan Darbourne assembled a very fine group of soloists together with a number of the James Bowman Young Artists 2025. They were ably supported with a perfectly weighted band of strings, oboes, theorbo and organ, who also contributed some independent instrumental items. Malcolm Sinclair was the reader throughout. The technical standard was high and the these relatively small forces coped very well with the cavernous spaces of the former Baroque church of St John’s.
A short review can only draw attention to a few particular highlights. Counter tenor Alexander Chance gave an exceptional performance of Purcell’s ‘Sweeeter that Roses’, brimming with a sensuality to match Wilde’s own concern that infatuation and pleasure can descend into malady and madness. Among the other shorter items it was also arresting to hear what later becomes the main chorale theme in the St Matthew Passion set to a very different secular text of 1601; and Darbourne’s choral arrangement of a late Brahms organ prelude deserves repeated listening for its plangent inwardness. As a whole the biggest revelation was the chromatic intensity of the Zelenka setting, which was full of anguished chromaticism, powerfully dramatised by both singers and players, and revealing the composer’s debt to Italian composers. Another reminder that we need to know so much more about the composers employed at the Dresden court in the first half of the eighteenth century.
I had a few niggling complaints. It was distracting that the performers were already moving onto the stage for the next item, whether vocal or spoken, before the last one had finished – given the quality of what we were hearing this was distracting and unnecessary in what was not an over-long evening. Why the breakneck pace of delivery? Also, I felt that Sinclair could have found somewhat more vocal variety in his delivery of the passages from De Profundis. Yes, the tone is broadly similar across the work, but his strikingly memorable and deeply moving reading of Wilde’s short story ‘The Selfish Giant’ at the end of the evening shows what could be done; and some of this variety of inflection would have helped out and enhanced the earlier sections.
However, overall this was a richly satisfying evening which matched consistency of theme with variety of material to weave a highly original creative tapestry.
Vache Baroque
Music: Zelenka, Bach and others
Conductor: Jonathan Darbourne
Performers include: Alexander Chance, Guy Cutting & Malcolm Sinclair
25 March 2025
1 hr 50 minutes with interval