Inspired by Shakespeare, Salut! Baroque proves that music is the food of love.

Read the Limelight review by Steve Moffatt on 3 February, 2026

Shakespeare was pretty blunt about people who didn’t like music, saying that anyone who “is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils”.

This quote from The Merchant of Venice inspired and neatly encapsulated Salut! Baroque’s program for their opening concert of the season in the unfamiliar surrounds of the Long Room in Sydney’s Customs House, a stone’s throw away from the Conservatorium where they normally play.

The “sweet sounds” were provided by four recorders imitating human voices floating in four-part harmony above Tim Blomfield’s five-string piccolo cello for the opening piece In Nomine Crye by Christopher Tye, who died when the Bard was still a “whining school-boy with his satchel”.

The quartet – Anna Stegman, Sally Melhuish, Alana Blackburn and Alicia Crossley – interweaved seamlessly creating a mellow consort, richer in tone than the more familiar setting for viols.

Blomfield and his co-founder and Artistic Director Melhuish compiled a program featuring five composers who were all flourishing in the early 18th century, but in two of the hotbeds of Baroque music, Italy and Germany.

The greatest of these, Georg Philipp Telemann, like his friend JS Bach, used the works of Italian masters Corelli and Vivaldi, and orchestral suites of the French, as touchstones but brought his own tastes and sensibility to help create a German school, adding a weightiness and passion to the galant elegance of the south.

Salut performed two of his works, the first, a selection of airy dance movements from Ouverture-Suite in D minor TWV 55:d3, including a Menuet featuring recorders and George Wills on theorbo, a sprightly Hornpipe and an energetic Canaries, a leaping dance from the Canary Islands.

The other Telemann work highlighted the skills of the string players, the Concerto in D major for 4 Violins TWV 40:202, its joyful Allegro finale taking flight like the flocks of pigeons seen through the room’s tall windows, circling in formation.

Telemann would have known the other German on the program, Johann David Heinichen, both for his influential treatise on basso continuo and for the fact that he worked with Bach at Prince Leopold’s court in Anhalt-Cöthen. His Concerto à 8 in C major called on the full ensemble of 12 for its outer movements while the Pastorell featured some sliding bagpipe effects over a drone from violinist John Ma and recorderist Stegmann.

The Italians were represented by three composers – Florentine violinist, painter and poet Giuseppe Valentini, Venetian Cristoforo Caresana and Neapolitan Nicola Fiorenza, whose Concerto for flute in F minor featured some superb solo work by Stegmann.

The short Valentini piece for strings, harpsichord and theorbo comprised a brief yearning slow intro and a Vivaldian Allegro to finish, while Wills broke out the baroque guitar to provide some Spanish spice for Caresana’s La Tarantella, which ended with final slurred descent as the spider’s poison took hold.

Two ear-catching anonymous sets of variations rounded out the entertaining 90-minute set – an irresistible recorder quartet setting of that tune so beloved of ice cream vans, Greensleeves, and Chacona from Collection Flores de música, with Brad Tham strumming his viola guitar style to enthusiastic applause.