What was the Lufthansa baroque festival has lost its main sponsor but has reinvented itself. The new London Festival of Baroque Music began with a programme lasting only five days, but with enough clout to attract some sought-after performers – such as the Bach Collegium Japan. Their all-Bach concert bore little connection to the festival’s theme of “women in baroque music”. But Bach is what Masaaki Suzuki’s international ensemble is named for, what they excel at, and what we want to hear them play.
Suzuki directed everything from a harpsichord slotted on top of a chamber organ, as if in a game of keyboard Tetris. Compared with the muscular and almost adversarial style that some period-instrument ensembles veer towards, this was more temperate playing. In the D minor Concerto for Two Violins, the accompanying players, one to a part, did not fade into the background but were on an almost equal footing with the soloists, making for a warm but sometimes opaque texture. The soloists’ contributions seemed less a dialogue than a friendly interweaving of musical lines, and the music was allowed to evolve rather than being bounced into shape.
The same went for the Concerto in C minor for oboe and violin in the second half. Masamitsu San’nomiya’s oboe was not ideally sweet-toned next to Ryō Terakado’s violin, and nor could he match the yearning phrasing of soprano Hana Blažíková in the first aria of the cantata Mein Herze Schwimmt im Blut; but in the final movement he trilled and danced with the best of them. Blažíková’s gentle soprano was bright but soft-edged, and her lower range didn’t project with the same ease as her liquid high notes. Yet in the aria Alles mit Gott, accompanied only by Suzuki and Emmanuel Balssa’s cello, her voice rode the church acoustic beautifully, and the trumpet and soprano duets in the second cantata, Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen, were positively buoyant.
• The London Festival of Baroque Music 2015 is at St John’s, Smith Square and Westminster Abbey, London, until 19 May. Box office: 020-7222 1061.
