Apollo’s Cabinet are a period-performance group, but with a different angle from most: like a slightly less unbuttoned version of the Norway-based Barokksolistene, they are concerned more with storytelling than historical accuracy. Their debut CD is an engaging travelogue. Alexander Armstrong narrates from the diary entries of Charles Burney, the august historian who took two European tours in the early 1770s and made it his business to record the musical state of the continent.
Each diary entry leads to music: a perky Venetian ballad; a lovely Partita for two recorders by the Czech baroque composer František Ignác Tůma; a series of brief gavottes by Vienna’s Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, each named after their national character (Styria sounds fun, Germany buoyant but polite; the English one is melancholy, but not so bittersweet as the French).
Finally, back in England, there’s Burney’s own The Despairing Shepherd, an appealing showcase for soprano and violin here recorded for the first time. From a music-nerd point of view it would have been fascinating had the excerpts all dated from the exact years of Burney’s trip – the aria by Telemann, written in the 1720s, would have felt ancient by the time he visited Hamburg – but it’s all dispatched with plenty of freewheeling spirit.
