Dillington Baroque Fest

Listed on February 26, 2015 in Blogs!

Devon Baroque

Actually we didn’t call it a Baroque fest but the weekend was packed with music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Friday night kicked off a big weekend course taken by Roderick Swanston entitled Bach in Leipzig. On Saturday Colin Booth presented a talk and gave a recital exploring the subject of ‘the ground’ in music of this period. Colin is a fabulous harpsichord-maker as well as a musician of extraordinary talent and insight. His new CD is amazing. Played on an instrument of 1662 that he has restored, the sonorities and rhythmic inventions are totally convincing. Then on Sunday we all enjoyed a thrilling concert of orchestral favourites performed by Devon Baroque. Other than brass band concerts of the past, I don’t think we have ever enjoyed that number of performers on the Dillington stage before. They played to a capacity audience who revelled in the playfulness and drama of the music – Vivaldi, Pachelbel, Handel, Corelli and JS Bach. So there you have it; by the end of the weekend we were Baroqued out and left longing for a bit of Beethoven. Ah…dear Beethoven. Only after listening to so much Baroque music do you realise how great Beethoven was and remains. I say that with apologies to all of our wonderful musicians and music scholars.