We had tickets to hear Tenebrae at the Bath Bachfest, but the concert was cancelled as it proved impossible for the choir to reach Bath on the day when Storm Eunice struck. I was not the only person in Bath who would have gladly put up a singer overnight on the previous day if that had meant the concert could go ahead. To add insult to injury, Radio 3 broadcast that evening part of one of the pieces we would have heard.
However I didn’t miss the Bachfest altogether as I went to hear Mahan Esfahani and Mihala Petri perform on the Saturday morning. They’d visited four years ago but this time were in the Assembly Rooms not the Guildhall. I think they may have played at least one of the same pieces as then too, perhaps the J S Bach sonata which replaced one by CPE Bach they hadn’t had time to rehearse in situ (Eunice again).
You wouldn’t have guessed that Mahan Esfahani objects to Handel from the account of the sonata HWV 367a. Each performer had a solo turn: two virtuoso harpsichord sonatas by Scarlatti and a transcription (I’d guess Petri’s own) for recorder of Bach’s first Cello Suite. This survived the translation well, although there is the difficulty that unlike the cellist, the recorder player has to breathe (or rather, that their breathing interrupts the music). The encore was more sober than last time.
Sunday was a busy day for singing with a Eucharist at the Abbey (anthems by Willan and Tallis) and an evensong at Christ Church which tested my sight-singing abilities with David Halls’ Responses, the Totney Mag and Nunc after Howells (OK I had done these once before) and an anthem by Stuart Beer, for whom I used to sing at Manchester but never his own music.