One of my shortcomings is that I often find Handel’s Italian operas hard going, but this performance managed to sidestep my prejudices, and the shortcomings of listening on the internet, to grab my attention. Compelling singing, and the OAE’s sparky and expressive playing conjured the succession of moods very effectively, neatly leaping across the language barrier to create a highly rewarding experience. As it was on the web site, I could succumb to the unexpected urge to listen repeatedly.

I was less surprised to be captivated by the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini’s musical celebration of 1605 in the Proms Chamber Music Series. It’s easy, and wrong, to see early 17th-century music as a stepping stone towards the high baroque. I Fagiolini exploded that myth with richly expressive performances of two madrigals from Monteverdi’s Fifth Book, two sonatas for two violins and continuo by Ucellini, whose rhapsodic and improvisatory writing felt like consort music set free. Carissimi’s oratorio Jonah, which closed the programme, brought that combination of freedom and expression into highly communicative focus.

Improvisation inevitably presents a tension in early music. On the one hand, we know that it was a normal part of musical life, and is therefore essential to historically informed performance and to the understanding of historical sources. But much of the revolution in early music has happened because people have tried to perform early music without the additions of later generations - including inappropriate improvisation.

This was the starting point for this year’s South Bank Centre Early Music Weekend. I caught most of the performances on the third day and was impressed both by the quality and the diversity. It’s unfair to talk about improvisation as if it were an extra element grafted on to the music; the improvisatory element of each performance was more a matter of entering faithfully into the spirit of the music and the tradition from which it came.

At a theoretical level, pianist David Owen Norris gave an illustrated talk, mostly on the improvisation of cadenzas, which brought to mind the stories of Handel and Mozart improvising in their keyboard concertos.

In performance, Apollo and Pan produced a sparkling programme of early (mostly Italian) seventeenth-century music for two renaissance violins, dulcian and harpsichord/organ. This was notated music drawing on improvisatory forms, such as repeated bass patterns or embellishments of what would have been familiar tunes, but it called to mind the way in which jazz musicians often write down little more than an aide memoire which, like this, can seem bare on paper, but comes to life in the hands of imaginative performers.

The Dufay Collective’s entry into the spirit of improvisation took this much further, magically entering into the world of the thirteenth-century Cantigas de amigo of Martin Codax. They spun an hour of music for six performers from seven poems, six of which have one line of music, and the seventh has only words. Imaginative staging made the experience haunting.

Some people will be uncomfortable, in that this performance was more about how a short manuscript can fire the imaginations of some very able performers than about an unadorned re-creation. Yet there would have been a visual dimension in performance, and it’s likely instrumentalists would have been involved, so that the Dufay Collective were taking Codax’s manuscript and adding an authentic level of improvisation. The length of the queue at the stall selling CDs showed how well the audience responded to the results.

The first notes of the Berlin Akademie für Alte Musik’s concert took me by surprise, having a string sound that was quite unlike most British baroque orchestras (though I was surprised to hear, for the first time, something similar from the Academy of Ancient Music a few weeks later). Given that styles did vary from place to place in the eighteenth century, this is a good thing. A diverse continuo group, comprising of two lute/guitar players, a cellist, double bass player, and someone playing both organ and harpsichord, lent richness and variety to the continuo sound. Two of the pieces were based on La Follia, with several people suspecting that here, and in Midori Seiler’s exquisite performance of the Passacaglia from Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, there were more variations than in the published score.

The evening finished with a very exciting concert by L’Arpeggiata, joined by Gianluigi Trovesi on clarinet, jazz singer Lucilla Galeazzi, and alto Philippe Jaroussky. If I describe their performance as somewhere between seventeenth-century music and jazz it will sound like an uncomfortable compromise. Instead it was an utterly compelling exploration, mixing the improvisatory dimensions of both traditions to create something of artistic integrity and pure delight.

The nine members of L’Arpeggiata, directed by Christina Pluhar mostly play what could loosely be called continuo instruments, yet these range from the familiar harpsichord and bass viol to percussion and psalterion, all coming together with creativity and imagination, sitting comfortably with the more jazz-based idiom of Trovesi and Galeazzi. Jaroussky managed to make more-or-less straight renditions of Monteverdi sound no less fresh. The mixing of worlds as the three soloists came together in the last item was quite unforgettable. This was an occasion to buy the CD on the way out (though it lacks Jaroussky’s contribution), because the music was far to interesting to hear only once.
Mark Argent