The church of St Michael and All Angels has been blessed with an acoustic that would be the boast of architects and engineers today. And few ensembles could be better suited to its particular ambience than the period group Charivari Agréable Simfonie, with viols speaking in their misted tone and every note of the delicate theorbo and harpsichord absolutely distinct. Their programme of German Sacred Songs of Sorrow treads a fine line between lamentation and religious ecstacy. You are seduced by the exquisite refinement of sound at the same time as being stabbed by the anguished chromatic harmonies. Most poignant of all was the Ach, dass ich Wassers g'nug hötte of Johann Christoph Bach, where the expressive high tenor of Mark Milhofer gave the music incredible intensity.
The warm, sweet tone quality of violinist Madeleine Mitchell, in her recital with pianist Andrew Ball, seemed a logical progression from the Baroque sounds of the previous evening. The virtuosity of Ball emerged from the sometimes wild excesses of the Sonata in E minor by Eugene Goossens, an early work owing as much to Debussy and Ravel as to César Franck. While this is a welcome rehabilitation of Goossens, the lack of concise structure suggests that this is not a neglected masterpiece.
From his confessional programme note, Andrew Wilson-Dickson's new piece sounded like a mischievous bit of pilfering from the three sonatas of Brahms, but it was an expression of real affection. Conceived as a single movement, Aimez-vous Brahms? owed little to Françoise Sagan and much to the collage techniques of Matisse and Picasso. Taking phrases and motives, displacing and replacing them and subverting the rich harmonies, Wilson-Dickson created a surprisingly elegant and atmospheric work. The element of homage centred on a quotation from the slow movement of the G major sonata, but managed not to be too self-conscious. Mitchell declared her own loyalty to Brahms before performing the D minor sonata, but that was obvious from the commitment she brought to the Wilson-Dickson. The two pieces made an intriguing pairing.
