Once again, this year's South Bank Early Music Weekend combined the cerebral with the quirky, with the latter to the fore on a closing evening that had its share of party atmosphere.
Saturday's programme was partly a celebration of Thomas Tallis, whose 500th anniversary, by best guesses, falls this year. The day ended - how else? - with the Tallis Scholars performing his 40-part motet Spem in Alium. But the quiet focus of the afternoon had been a harpsichord recital by one of the elder statesmen of the early music movement: Gustav Leonhardt.
He began with a handful of Tallis pieces, then moved on to more substantial, keyboard-friendly works by Byrd, coursing through the changes of metre in the Fantasia and bringing real depth of feeling to the second of two Pavans. Performers don't come much more introspective than Leonhardt, but in his hands these pieces had an intensity that made the small effort it took to engage with them worthwhile.
The theme of the weekend was improvisations, and, whether in 21st-century jazz or a 17th-century chaconne, those demand a predictable chord sequence. So it was no surprise that Sunday's concert by Berlin's outstanding Akademie für Alte Musik contained a few more repetitions of La Folia, the baroque era's answer to the 12-bar blues, than strictly necessary. But the group radiated warmth in Vivaldi and Geminiani as well as some more unusual gems, including Georg Muffat's Sonata no 5. Two high points involved only a few players: a Sinfonia by Corbetta for theorbo, guitar and virtuoso cello, and Biber's Passacaglia in G for solo violin, with which Midori Seiler held the audience rapt.
The final concert teamed the viols and psalterion of L'Arpeggiata with the Italian jazz clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and folk singer Lucilla Galeazzi for an off-the-wall programme of songs - including a few foot-tappers by Galeazzi herself - and dance improvisations that showed how similar these three traditions actually are. There were moments when the members of L'Arpeggiata seemed jazz musicians manqués, keener to let their hair down than the slightly restrained Trovesi. In their version of Pozzi's Cantata Sopra il Passacaglio, it was Trovesi who supported flights of fancy from the countertenor Philippe Jaroussky rather than the other way round. Jaroussky, a singer to watch, hammed up the same cantata gamely for the self-consciously jazzy version that brought the weekend to a celebratory close.
