Stile Antico’s concert at the 2019 Bach Festival in Bath was very well attended. I noticed a coach outside St Mary’s Church afterwards to take people away, and have learned that some local tour companies block-book at popular concerts. This may explain why some of them sell out so quickly, and also the age profile; certainly the audience age at this one was among the highest I’ve seen at a concert in Bath (which is saying something!), based on those people I saw.
I was up in the gallery, behind someone who I think may have been there to accompany his wife. At any rate, he spent much of the performance time in a circular sequence of opening his programme book (a large booklet covering the whole Festival’s concerts), finding the text and translation of the piece currently being performed, studying it, closing it, then opening the programme book to find his place again a couple of minutes later. The easternmost two sets of seats in the gallery weren’t available to us.
This was my third Stile Antico concert, and it consisted of works by Schütz and J S Bach written for funeral or memorial services, well suited to the week of a family funeral. Much of it was accompanied by continuo, sometimes including a theorbo (I am not an early music specialist but I’m now able to tell one of these from an archlute). When I first encountered this repertoire, the prevailing practice was to perform unaccompanied everything which could be so performed, but current attitudes towards accompaniment are more flexible.
There have been changes in personnel in Stile Antico in the last couple of years, but the group still has the chemistry which allows them to keep ensemble and agree on such matters as dynamics without a conductor, even when some of the singers were at one point detached from the rest at the very east end of the church. Schütz’ Musikalische Exequien showed up that their solo voices aren’t as interesting as those of say the Tallis Scholars or the Sixteen, in other words this ensemble is greater than the sum of its parts. The other two motets by Schütz fared rather better, as did the two Bach motets (Komm, Jesu, komm and Jesu, meine Freude). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stile Antico’s performance practice worked best in those movements in the latter which involved fewer than the total number of singers. I was rather surprised that as far as I could tell the Bach motets were performed at A=440. The encore was Thomas Campion’s Never weather-beaten sail which I think I heard the Tallis Scholars do as an encore in the same place a few months ago.