Music to Celebrate (Salut! Baroque)
From its box of birds opener to Telemann at teatime, Salut! celebrates the span of the Baroque and 30 years of music-making.
Reviewed by Steve Moffatt, Limelight Magazine on 4 February, 2025
It started 30 years ago when three musicians with a passion for the Baroque got together to form a band, fashioning an acronymic name from initial characters of their first names – Sally, Luke (Green) and Tim.
Since then, Salut! Baroque, under its joint Artistic Directors recorderist Sally Melhuish and cellist Tim Blomfield, has established itself as a popular and integral part of Sydney’s early music scene with 11 studio albums reaching a wide audience.
Their anniversary concert season was launched in Canberra and Sydney at the weekend with a typically enjoyable and immaculately performed program of works by heavyweights Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann and Pietro Antonio Locatelli and some less familiar names, spanning the 150 or so years of the Baroque – all leavened by an impossibly catchy recorder quartet, Balkanology, by Moravian folk musician Jan Rykota.
Joined by guest Anna Stegmann, who is recorder professor at London’s Academy of Music, Melhuish and fellow recorderists Alana Blackburn and Alicia Crossley opened proceedings with an acappella arrangement of Tarquinio Merula’s 1615 work La Lusignola (The Nightingale). The instruments proved ideal for the fugal birdsong, their lines weaving in and out with Crossley’s bass chomping along beneath the others and Stegmann piping over the top. Truly a box of birds!
The strings featured in Locatelli’s Arianna’s Tears Concerto à quattro, led by John Ma’s violin and underpinned by Blomfield’s Baroque bass violin and Monika Kornel’s harpsichord. There were some minor tuning problems in the slower parts of this work with its long first movement, almost a mini-concerto in itself starting with a sobbing Andante and alternating fast and slow sections, followed by a Largo, then a brief Allegro finishing with another wistful Largo.
All 10 musicians lined up for a concerto by German recorder composer Johann Christian Schickhardt, who may have crossed paths with JS Bach as he was court musician at both Weimar and Cöthen. Stegmann and Ma shared duets and swapped soloing in a top-notch performance of this warm and engaging work.
Giovanni Antonio Guido wrote his Four Seasons a few years before Vivaldi composed his big hit, and three short extracts from the Genoan’s Summer section made for interesting comparisons – no fierce storms or drunken Bacchanalias here but a courtly Danse des faunes instead.
However there was some Vivaldian turbulence on hand with the opening movement of his Concerto in D minor RV 566 with the four recorders leading while Ma and Julia Russoniello’s violins duelled athletically.
The excerpts from Balletti by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1623-1680) – described by one diarist as “the famous and nearly (my italics) most distinguished violinist in all Europe” – were very short and sweet with Stegmann evoking more birdsong in the charming Canarios in one of these musical interludes used in performances of Italian operas.
The ten-minute Telemann Concerto a quattro in A minor TWV 43:a3 is music that, along with Bach and Handel, marks the apotheosis of the late Baroque, with all instrumentalists on an equal footing and both Ma and Stegmann getting vigorous virtuosic workouts.
It was a satisfyingly joyous finish to the afternoon.