Spirit (Salut! Baroque)

Salut! Baroque serve up some tasty treats in their wide-ranging feast for the senses.

Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 13 April, 2025
Read the 4 star Limelight Magazine reviewed by Steve Moffatt.

Salut! Baroque, under its joint Artistic Directors recorderist Sally Melhuish and cellist Tim Blomfield, has been delighting Sydney and Canberra early music enthusiasts for 30 years with its concerts featuring diverse and often obscure works from various centuries and countries.

This latest musical degustation took in some fiery tapas with works by two 18th century Spaniards; some sumptuous French fare from the time of Louis Quinze; a dollop of spicy goulash, alongside tasty dishes from Germany and Britain. It started in the present day with a mock Baroque charmer by Soft Machine founder Sir Karl Jenkins, and ended with Professor Teddy Bor’s charming and ingenious spoof on JS Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.

The historically informed instruments – Baroque violins, viola, cello piccolo, bass violin, double bass, guitar, theorbo and harpsichord – entered a time warp when percussionist Jack Peggie added brushes and snare drum to the Bach as Bor’s arrangement of the pared down movements deftly wove popular tunes like Ain’t She Sweet and Glen Miller’s In The Mood into the Bachian fabric, prompting a loud ovation from the Conservatorium audience.

Jenkins’ Allegretto from Palladio, his 1995 take on the concerto grosso form, with its march-like rhythm on the side drum, made for a lively hors d’oeuvre, the martial atmosphere carrying over into the next work by little-known German composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach (1657-1714), most of whose works, sadly for us, were destroyed in a fire.

His Ouverture-Suite No. 6 shows why his works were so admired at a time when Bach was just starting out. Similar in form to Bach’s great orchestral suites – with dance movements including a Gavotte, a dolorous La Plainte, two grand Airs Entrée and a rousing Chaconne – the short excerpts also featured some nice trio moments from John Ma and Julia Russoniello’s violins and Blomfield’s cello piccolo, and the twin recorders of Melhuish and Alana Blackburn and Brad Tham’s viola.

No Baroque concert would be complete without some Telemann and the three extracts from his Ouverture-Suite in B flat major, also known Ouverture Burlesque, were in stark contrast to the earlier suite. After brief character sketches of Colombine and a cheeky Pierrot, it was time for some exotic tambourine work and catchy rhythms from harpsichordist Monika Kornel and the bass section for the closing piece Mezzetin en Turc.

George Wills performed an attractive instrumental solo, Folias Gallegas by Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739) – some variations over a repetitive ground chord sequence – on his 10-string Baroque guitar with some light percussion before the whole company joined in for the full dramatic sweep of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Ouverture from his 1749 opera Zoroastre.

Next came a trip to the British Isles with a slow air and jig by the blind Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan and Scotsman Niel Gow’s famous Lament. There’s a sad story behind this last work. Gow was a famous fiddler and composer but when his wife died he put away his fiddle for a long time until his son persuaded him to get it out of the case again and this lovely tune was written to show his grief.

Salut! then took to the dance floor for a triple hornpipe from John Playford’s 17th century collection The English Dancing Master before heading east for Dmitrie Cantemir’s Moldavian Dances.

Blomfield’s meticulously researched and interest program notes show Cantemir to be a fascinating and multi-talented man who was not only a composer but also a scholar and diplomat who spoke 11 languages and served four Ottoman sultans, as well as Tsar Peter the Great of Russia.

The recorders of Melhuish and Blackburn duelled in Spaniard oboist-composer José Pla’s Sonata in D minor, a work he must have played with his brother and fellow oboist Joan on their journey around Europe in the 1700s and which ended with castanets and a light fandango.