HOUSE OF DREAMS is not a typical early music concert, but its concept creates an excellent multi-faceted entertainment. Tafelmusik performs throughout with incredible energy, exquisite blend and an infectious joy in music making. The fine playing is further highlighted by a dramatic commentary which gives insight into the social and artistic routines of each composer’s city.
Tafelmusik’s performance formula also includes playing of the programme completely from memory. Unhindered by music stands or seating where possible the members move with great fluidity about the stage. Musical textures, structures and interactions between instrumental lines are greatly enhanced in this environment.
Actor Blair Williams leads us through each European city linked to major composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Each bracket of pieces is labelled as a ‘house’ from a particular city. Each composer’s life, output, houses and his city’s important buildings are described with reference to the city’s place in art and social history.
A huge gold frame at the rear of the stage above the ensemble accommodates the concert’s most rewarding visual element. On this panel continual projections of period paintings appear, illustrating the links between music, musicians, audiences and art.
Most of Tafelmusik’s seventeen members move upstage as soloists or as part of small groups. In this way the talent within the ranks of this ensemble is celebrated as well as their fine period instruments. We have the opportunity to hear musical favourites from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as being introduced to lesser heard pieces by Bach, Handel, Marais, Sweelinck and Vivaldi.
Tafelmusik gives us the chance to hear the Allegro from Vivaldi’s Concerto in G minor for two cellos RV 531 with fine interplay between the dueling soloists. The Largo for oboes, bassoon and continuo based on Bach’s haunting cantata aria Im Tod, ist alles still is also elegantly offered. Vivaldi’s bassoon concerto’s Allegro and an expressive concerto movement for lute bring us various shades of the composer’s output in Venice.
Highlights of the staged and projected history include a description of activity in Handel’s London abode. The exquisite Leipzig house of Bach’s affluent neighbours with a huge art collection and music spaces is well painted verbally, with projections and through musical nuance. Images woven through Marin Marais’ suite from the opera Alcyone help us visit the contrasts and joy in this drama. We also see the city and building in which this drama premiered.
HOUSE OF DREAMS is a showcase of the arts. Its innovations and dreamlike quality make for an exciting start to the seventieth anniversary year for Musica Viva. This Canadian group also begins the 2015 Musica Viva International Series Concerts. Their concert has wide-ranging appeal as themes of art, music, location, lifestyle and creativity are thoroughly explored.
Tafelmusik perform a second Sydney concert of HOUSE OF DREAMS in the City Recital Hall on Sunday 1 March at 2pm.