Hair streaked with blue, face bubble-gum pink, eyes highlighted in yellow, Andy Warhol paid homage to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with joyful freedom, creating a vivid dialogue between Italian Renaissance high art and American mass culture. His reworking loosely exemplifies a growing trend for musicians to try something similar: a Handel aria sung into a microphone, with pulsating keyboard accompaniment, turns into a yet more impassioned soul song. The same composer’s instrumental Concerto Grosso, Op 6 No 10 is reinvented as a vocal piece – with AI Handelbot-generated lyrics (Bfjjfid Ooooh eeeee aahhhh iiii ghdjjrr) for those who want to trill along.
Three events last week presented versions of this kind of baroque-update experiment. Two were at Stone Nest, the ex-Welsh chapel, ex-nightclub on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue: Arias Reimagined, part of the London Handel festival, with the independent record label nonclassical; and Rhythm of the Seasons, presented by the venue’s resident group, Figure, which included an interpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on percussion.
