Over The Sea To Skye concert opens Brighton Early Music Festival’s autumn sequence

Authentic traditional Scottish songs in Hesperi’s own arrangements, punctuating French and Italian baroque instrumental music, all contemporaneous with the heart-stirring story of the Great Jacobite Rebellion 1743-45, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the Culloden battle defeat, depicted in the popular historical TV drama ‘Outlander’. Love interest: the pre-battle marriage of a rebel highlander to a time-travelling wife, a stillbirth, and eventually him badly wounded.

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There seems an innate freedom in so much live early music that it casts a spell so easily revived once heard again after time away. As BREMF resumed for the autumn, what did it for me this time around? I think, the sound of a sopranino recorder gently piercing the sound cavern of St Martin’s. Could I have called it sublime? I think I could. The moment Mary-Jannet Leith chose to introduce it, five items into this attractive story concert. It made such a surprise entry. She suddenly switched from the warm and mellow tenor recorder with which already, deep into her pre-concert talk, she had sliced me in half. She had broken her long stretch of spoken word at last with a musical illustration, which she played with gloriously instantaneous affinity, affection and nuanced expression – as her personal switch was thrown into performing mode.

At this later new moment, in the concert-proper, the sopranino (the piccolo’s ancestor) lifted into the roof Ensemble Hesperi’s rendition of Bonny Jean of Aberdeen, from the 1732 Collection of Best Scots Tunes arranged and published in Paris by ex-pat doctor Alexander Munro. And it made me more acquiescent that Hesperi’s act of foot-tapping dance rhythms, laments, seasonal airs, with finger-snapping Scottish songs in tongue-twisting dialect, both baring the Scottish soul against France’s baroque backdrop, was being staged in a quasi-cathedral.

It’s arguably best suited to a club setting. Ensemble Hesperi are part-protégées of BREMF having emerged at the pre-pandemic BREMF Live! Showcase’ event. The emerging ensembles heard theren then play ‘BREMF Live! Clubnight’ at The Rose Hill arts pub not half a mile away from St Martin’s.

BREMF probably had some dilemma about choice of venue for ‘Over The Sea To Skye’, with its raw subject and folk dimension. That surprise, plaintive piping sopranino moment would still have happened at The Rose Hill. But it’s a smaller club venue than this concert needed to hit the spot. It’s odd this city has not yielded up a larger suitable hostelry. This concert thrived on ever-changing mood and colour in response to multiple events. The narrative travelled through early love and parental anguish, mounting optimistic political ambition, counter-fears of rebellion failure, a campaigning period in Paris, the husband’s readiness to die in battle, a time-travel parting of the couple (Outlander’s plot emotion twister), later reunion, the Jacobite dream shattered and their surviving fighters abused by the victors – keeping the cause alive. Who flew the Scots flag?

Hesperi played Munro’s Bonny Jean of Aberdeen (as above) and the traditional Charlie is My Darling (with audience-participation chorus), The White Cockade (male singer, female lyric), Wha’ll be king but Charlie, Cam Ye O’er Frae France? And finally Anne Campbelle MacLeod’s late 19th century collection of The Skye Boat Song, stemmed from her hearing a tune while she made that very ferry crossing. It was rendered with a beautiful watery flow by the full Hesperi ensemble. Plus James Oswald’s takes on The Sweet Sultan, for autumn; Alloway House, The Parting Kiss, Tears of Scotland; and The Ranunculus for spring. Not forgetting Robert Bremner’s continually joyful harpsichord solo on the tune Maggie Lauder.

The French palace wallpaper came each in several movements. A Jacques-Martin Hotteterre trio sonata, played often with athleticism sometimes graceful, sometimes fleet of foot; Joseph Bodin de Boismortier’s trio, Balets de Villages; and Francesco Geminiani’s trio sonata on Nish aboon Traquair. Curly-thatched tenor Ruairi Bowen had too southern a celtic name but the right Scottish family elders to check his rehearsal pronunciation. He revelled in articulating his half-foreign tongue – and we had the texts to follow what to Sassenachs otherwise appeared gobbledegook. He was invigoratingly crisp in The White Cockade, forthright and muscular in others, but touching in Oswald’s baroque-coloured The Parting Kiss, with his boldly winning legato in the first song that was slow enough to discern the words.

Hesperi constantly varied their line-up, to tickle our instrumental senses. Bougt, the Swede, sat out on several numbers, so when present he enhanced the continuo’s rhythm with guitar and its lethargic luxury when on theorbo. Florence Petit’s period cello soloed with harpsichord lending its mellower tone and, late on, a ‘period-drama’ eeriness to the air, Alloway House. Hesperi’s encore (“a bit of 20th century Scotland,” announced Leith) was hearteningly self-justifying, with or without the badge of time-travel to tally with the Overlander’s angle of story-telling. It came with that theorbo luxury, deepest strings stroking hearts’ deepest depths. It was Hesperi’s arrangement of none other than Peter Maxwell Davies’s ‘Farewell to Stromway’. Gosh, it never fails to move even those English . . .

Richard Amey

www.bremf.org.uk and Facebook

https://www.ensemblehesperi.com/ and Facebook

https://www.jonatanbougt.com/

https://www.ruairibowen.com/