“As you’ve never heard it before” was perhaps a bit of a strong sell for this performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio by Solomon’s Knot, the final event of the Spitalfields Music winter festival. It was, admittedly, unusual: there was no conductor, and the singers performed the whole thing from memory. Moreover, it was unflaggingly engaging and direct.
Solomon’s Knot are a young baroque group who make a point of being a collective, and whose desire to engage with their audience on this occasion extended to the co-artistic director Jonathan Sells telling us where they were going to go drinking afterwards. Sells was one of two bass soloists; there were eight singers in all, sitting or standing in front of the instrumental ensemble and, to some small extent, interacting – though deeming it “dramatisation” when people in concert frocks took occasional steps and looked at each other or the audience was stretching things.
The looking was disconcerting at first: there we were, in the middle of a city where one learns to mistrust smiling strangers making eye contact, suddenly confronted with a stage full of them. Nor did all of the singers look quite comfortable without holding a book: what were they meant to do with their hands? Yet their voices impressed. Michal Czerniawski’s countertenor was focused and buoyant, and mezzo Kate Symonds-Joy sounded and looked grounded from the start.
Perhaps a conductor would have made more of the interplay between violin, oboe and soprano in the Part 4 aria, sung with crystal clarity by Zoë Brookshaw; indeed, perhaps a conductor would have been able to fix the few moments of inexact tuning. But for the majority of the evening, with some leadership from violinist John Crockatt and busy first oboist Leo Duarte, the music tripped by with convincingly single-minded energy. Not as we’d never heard it before, but well worth hearing.
