Red
Priest: Red Hot Baroque
Magazine
Intro page:
I
have painful memories of playing the recorder at infant school, but
in Piers Adams’ hands it is transformed into a dazzling virtuoso star.
His bravura approah has the true spirit of the baroque. The original
Red Priest should be dancing in his grave.
Main
feature:
A
dark stage. Occasional flashes of lightning, thunder rumbles. Dry ice
swirls in a red glow as four silhouetted figures appear against the
backlit stage. There’s a lady in a basque, someone wearing devil’s horns.
The crowd strains forward. A man in black leathers emerges. And launches
into…. a solo on the descant recorder.
Incongruous?
Surreal? Musical nights out don’t come much wackier than Red Priest’s
‘Red Hot Baroque’, recently at the London’s Hackney Empire and soon
to be featured on the South Bank Show. Critics on both sides of the
Atlantic have been falling over themselves to coin the neatest label
for the four-strong ensemble led by Piers Adams: ‘Putting the viva back
in Vivaldi’; ‘The taste of bugs bunny with the heroic self-restraint
of Elton John.’ ‘Antonio Vivaldi meets the Marx brothers’, ‘The Spike
Joneses of the Baroque’. Some are in danger of becoming over-excited
in the rush: ‘They plunged an adrenalin-filled syringe into Vivaldi’s
heart’. Ouch. Enough said.
But
for it’s cunning creator, recorder wizard Piers Adams, this is not just
a marketing exercise in bringing Vivaldi to the fans of Def Leppard.
It’s a way of performing that arises from the music itself. After all,
as he points out, the word Baroque means ‘bizarre’; improvisation was
expected of performers at the time, and the relationships between drama,
dance and music were more fluid. ‘We have been doing theatrical performances
for years, and this show just took it one stage further and added lighting,
amplification, sound affects and video.’
The first half, a ‘Baroque Carnival’
includes Robert Johnson’s Witches Dance, performed by violinist Julia
Bishop and cellist Angela East in semi-darkness complete with infra-red
bow sticks and cackling; a wittily enacted Vivaldi fugue and a staggering
performance of Corelli’s La Folia which included variations in a jazz
mood, an Indian style and, most unexpectedly, a foray into Elgar’s cello
concerto. In the second half there is a performance
of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, arranged for recorder (where the violin part
requires double-stopping, Adams simply plays two recorders at once), violin,
cello and harpsichord. Red Priest’s recording of the work was released
on the Dorian label to universal delight in 2003 when even the hoariest
critics had to concede defeat. The group have taken the original
idea one step further by performing it before a screen of slow-moving
seasonal landscapes and rolling skies. Their Autumnal peasants are drunk
and disorderly, their spring birds unruly and the barking dog bends the
barlines and ends up asleep on stage with his legs in the air. When it
comes to the hunt, Adams is pursued by his two string players and ends
up fatally wounded by their bows. It’s half-way between a Mark Morris
choreography and a pantomime of Robin Hood, with a dash of Monty Python
silliness thrown in for good measure.
Adams
is keen to remain unpredictable, and original. ‘There were many wild,
crazy musicians at that time. The treatise writers, like Quantz, wouldn’t
have felt the need to reprimand players if they hadn’t been breaking
the rules! I think there’s a tendency to look at history as if through
a telescope the wrong way up; we see one small picture with the differences
erased, instead of the bigger picture with all its messy variety.
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‘Accounts
of the time suggest that music was not only played in private houses
and as part of elaborate aristocratic entertainments, but there were
also less formal public evenings during which there might be a movement
from this piece, and another from that well into the small hours. When
we were in Venice the other day at the Vivaldi museum, the curator told
us about a troupe of male musicians who visited a nunnery to play some
Vivaldi pieces, and finished the performance by exposing themselves!
That was the reality: some of it refined, some very earthy.’
One
of his ‘wild, crazy’ inspirations is Corelli, composer and violin virtuoso,
of whom Raguenet wrote in 1702, ‘I never met with any man that suffered
his passions to hurry him away so much whilst he was playing the violin…
his eyes will sometimes turn as red as fire; the countenance will be
distorted, his eyeballs roll as in agony…’ Another is the famous flautist
Quantz who described the Italian manner of performance in 1752 as: ‘arbitrary,
extravagant, artificial, obscure, frequently bold and bizarre, and difficult
in execution; it permits many additions of graces, and requires a seemly
knowledge of harmony.’
But
Adams is keen to point out that he is not interested in recreating an
‘authentic’ seventeenth century spectacle. It is the spirit of the music
he is seeking: ‘I do have a problem with pretending to be musicians
of a former era. There is something so false about absolute ‘authenticity’
because it attempts to ignore the two hundred-odd years of music history
in between. I want our audiences to experience our own, contemporary
take on this period.’
He
feels that some years ago baroque performance became quite rigidly formalised
in Britain: ‘I was getting bored of playing Baroque pieces, so I stopped
for a while, until I heard the Italian group Il Giardino Armonico –
their sound was percussive, vibrant, no holds barred – and I went back
to it with renewed energy. I’d dreamed for years of a sound like that,
and a way of letting your hair down with the music.’
The
result was the four-strong Red Priest, with several recordings now under
their belts and a busy diary. He puts down their particular success
in the United States to the more open attitude to Baroque performance
there: ‘I do think there is a standardised approach now in Europe, whereas
in America there is less period performance, and more of a feeling of
‘anything goes’.
The
use of amplification is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his
current show, but, as he explains, it is not simply there to pump up
the volume. ‘When you are touring a show like this, you are nearly always
going into theatres of halls with very poor acoustics, which is the
kiss of death for instruments like ours. So the sound engineers sampled
the acoustics of the Wigmore Hall, put it through a computer and tried
to recreate that in the Hackney Empire. I’m not saying it doesn’t all
need refining, but the technology exists now and I’m keen to use it
for musical reasons.’
You can catch Red Hot Baroque at
the Exeter Festival and the Wyastone Festival this summer and, if plans
are realised, at many other venues. And if the prospect of dry ice and
black leather doesn’t tempt, go for the star turn of the show: a puckish
Adams appears up in the dress circle, legs dangling nonchalantly over
a box and plays a set of Variations by Jacob Van Eyck: it’s the aural
equivalent of an acrobat on the high-wire, delivered with such panache,
precision and easy grace it took my breath clean away. Now that’s what
I call spectacular.
Helen Wallace
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