Classical review: The English Concert & David Daniels, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

In a Baroque timeline running from Alessandro Scarlatti in the early 1690s through to Bach in 1736, concluding with a leap back to 1707 and Handel, the English Concert’s Edinburgh International Festival appearance last night was one of pleasing variety.

The English Concert & David Daniels

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Star rating: * * *

With Harry Bicket directing unobtrusively from the harpsichord, pieces for ensemble were cleverly interspersed with concertos using soloists from within the ranks and vocal numbers featuring American countertenor David Daniels.

Acoustically not the right venue for this sort of music, the Usher Hall stage dwarfed the small group visually. While they mostly stood their own sound-wise, Katharine Spreckelsen’s oboe d’amore, a shyer instrument than its smaller, more common relation, needed a different sort of space and greater projection to have enough impact in Bach’s wonderfully melodious concerto lines for the instrument. In the same composer’s concerto for oboe plus violin, Nadja Zwiener faced similar challenges and was hard to hear much of the time.

Daniels, with a lightly lyrical, yet athletic voice that zipped vigorously around Handel’s endless operatic runs, had more of the measure of the hall in Vivaldi’s cantata Cessate, omai cessate, its higher tessitura bringing a quite different, more declamatory, sound than the Scarlatti which preceded it.