Tage Alter Musik – Almanach 2018

to relieve the stifling heat – a very welcome breath of fresh air. The early afternoon concert (in the Mi- noritenkirche) came from sollazzo ensem- ble , a young multi-award-winning Swiss group founded in 2014 in Basel – an impor- tant centre for early music performance. Their programme was Florence around 1350: music at the height of humanism and reflected the musical side of the Italian cul- tural explosion of that time, with pieces by Lorenzo and Giovanni da Firenze, Stefani, and the famed organist Landini. The music combined virtuosity with elegance and melodic charm. Led by Anna Danilevskaia, Sollazzo Ensemble also included soprano Perrine Deviller, countertenor Andrew Hal- lock, and tenor Vivien Simon, together with Roger Helou portative organ, Franziska Fleischanderl, hammered dulcimer, and Sophia Danilevskaia and Anna Danilevskaia on fidel. All three singers had the ability to gently project their voices into the cavernous acoustic, with the sound of soprano Perrine Deviller in particular often floating above a slower moving lower texture. The instru- mentalists provided very effective accompa- niments and solo pieces. This was an ex- tremely well-planned and professionally per- formed concert. I particularly liked the way they segued the pieces and stopped audience applause between pieces, usually with the tiny sound of a single note from one of the instruments. This is something that many far more experienced groups fail to do – let the audience know when, and when not to, applaud. The penultimate concert of the festival was in the gold-drizzled baroque interior of the Alten Kapelle , given by the nine instrumen- talists of Baroque atlantique from France, making their German debut. Their pro- gramme was given the title of an imaginary concert – Johann sebastian Bach – instru- mental works . If I understood it correctly, the aim was to replicate the sort of concert that Bach might have programmed with the Collegium Musicum at the Zimmermann’s coffee-house concerts in Leipzig. If that was the case, then it fell far short of the intended idea, with a sequence of arrangements of Bach pieces that didn’t seem to have any real logic or intellectual basis, an were unlikely to have been performed in the Zimmer- andrewbensonwilson.org 13 Roger Helou, Organetto, Sollazzo Ensemble Ensemble Baroque Atlantique in der Alten Kapelle