Thirty years ago, conductor Jos Van Immerseel gathered a handful of string players to explore French baroque and Viennese classical repertoire on period instruments. Now he’s marking his 70th birthday with Anima Eterna Brugge and this meaty Czech symphonic programme – still using period instruments, though a few centuries newer. In Janacek’s 1926 Sinfonietta, the impact is pretty subtle. Violins play on E strings made of gut rather than steel and slap on plenty of idiomatic slides between notes, but mostly it’s the light, bright articulation and taut energy that give away the band’s baroque sensibility. Patches of scrappy violin playing come as a bit of a jolt, but the brass fanfares are terrific – boisterous but clear as a bell. In Dvorak’s New World Symphony, the wind solos have a svelte, silvery charm, but Immerseel’s pacing tends toward plodding and the strings never find the dark-hewn heft they need.
