On a day that seemed to herald a new age of anxiety, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment offered consolation in the form of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Before embarking on their series entitled Bach, the Universe and Everything, they are taking the Brandenburgs on tour and while the Malvern didn’t quite get the full complement of six – No 1 was missing – this was still a huge lift to the spirits, Bach’s essential rhythmic vitality somehow representing resilience.
The Malvern theatres, once a ballroom, is not the obvious place for baroque repertoire, but with a wooden panelled screen in front of the black curtains allowing the acoustic to work well enough, the various combinations of soloists – each concerto different in instrumentation with the harpsichord at the core – and the OAE’s directness of communication, with each other and with the audience, created a warm rapport.
They opened with the Concerto No 2 in F major, noted for its fiendish high trumpet writing, but it was the intimacy achieved in the poignant dialogue between violin, oboe and recorder in the central D minor Andante that struck a deep chord.
Mutual sympathy and acute listening among the OAE string players characterised both the concertos No 3 in G and No 6 in B flat, with the matching mellow tone of the two violas in the latter tellingly colouring the sound. The artistry of this ensemble lies in the way they balance apparently easy virtuosity with a practised nonchalance, all undulating lines, individual phrasing always carrying its own expressive poise yet never losing the sense of overall momentum.
At the harpsichord, Steven Devine brought off the extraordinary cadenza of the fifth concerto with quiet panache, with the exchanges between Lisa Beznosiuk’s flute and the violin of Margaret Faultless – she is – always elegantly realised.
Setting the seal on a wonderfully satisfying evening was the Concerto No 4 in G major, with the brilliance of the writing for solo violin (Huw Daniels) and the calm of the duetting recorders carefully defined. Again, the minor mode of this central movement spoke volumes, with bright hope then spelled out in the exuberant Presto finale. As Dylan Thomas’s Organ Morgan so rightly put it in Under Milk Wood, “Oh Bach, without any doubt.”
• At The Anvil, Basingstoke, on 12 November and touring until 20 November.
