Thirty years young this season, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment opened its season with playing of seemingly undiminished energy. Tonight’s programme of Telemann and Handel – under Steven Devine’s lively direction from the keyboard – found the orchestra every bit as incisive as when many of the same players were in their hot youth three decades ago. There wasn’t a stale moment all evening.
In Telemann’s Overture in F the valveless horns whooped exuberantly, while oboes and bassoon chattered merrily. Handel’s D minor Concerto Grosso Op 3 No 5 was full of bright contrasts and sweet phrasing, and the Water Music Suite gave this ensemble of soloists the chance to shine individually and in unison. What James Galway once tartly described as all that emoting – the eye-contact between players, the swaying to the phrase and all the other tropes of early music platform culture – reinforced a thoroughly engaged and engaging evening.
Tenor Ian Bostridge was the pillar of the whole programme. The cerebral singer has a distinctive technique which he always puts to interpretative use. This was particularly marked in the by turn confiding and excited tone of Telemann’s cantata Dass mein Erlöser lebt, with which he opened, and, supremely, in Handel’s Scherza infida from Ariodante, not to mention the Silete Venti motet after the interval. In the former, Bostridge’s range of desolate remorse, against a caressing violin accompaniment, was very special. But it was the motet, with its prodigious range of vocal demands and expressive opportunities, and Bostridge now thoroughly warmed up vocally, that was the high point.
St John’s Smith Square is officially the temporary venue for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment during the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s refurbishment. Yet it would be a surprise if the OAE don’t stay longer. Drafty though it can be on a nippy evening, the 18th-century building and former church proved itself the perfect fit for this kind of late Baroque programme.
