Review: Beverley & East Riding Early Music Festival: Il Quadro Animato, Toll Gavel Church, Beverley, May 24; Lux Musicae Londo

BEVERLEY's early music festivities may not be as extensive as York’s, but they are becoming a force well worth reckoning with. This year’s opening and closing events were proof of the pudding, featuring emerging ensembles which seem headed for stardom.

Evening sun streamed on to Il Quadro Animato, a Milanese quintet now based in Frankfurt. Their programme mirrored the tour through the Low Countries, Germany and Austria by composer and diarist Charles Burney in 1772. The ensemble’s engine was the intelligent cellist Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi, always lively and perceptive.

A frisky trio sonata by Handel sported a very English Gigue (really a jig) and there was a fascinating stop-start finale in a Cannabich flute quartet. A Telemann sonata boasted typically lively Allegros, right up this group’s street, but it was a B minor Symphony by C P E Bach that won the laurels, with much inventive dialogue and a quicksilver Presto, around a moody Larghetto. A Haydn flute quartet paled by comparison.

Lux Musicae London has five players, fronted by a soprano and a tenor. They focused on music in London – "the New Troy" – in the first half of the 17th century, encompassing no fewer than 14 different English composers. Once again it was a low string, the viola da gamba of Harry Buckoke, which especially caught the ear, alone in some fantastical Tobias Hume and alongside the equally virtuosic recorders of Mirjam Münzel and Sophie Creaner in a John Jenkins fantasia.

Soprano Roberta Diamond and tenor Daniel Thomson combined effectively in a Byrd setting of Psalm 130 with bass recorder and in madrigal-style works by Jenkins, Hilton and Morley. Diamond bravely – and successfully – took on Nicholas Lanier’s extended cantata, Hero’s Complaint To Leander, with backing from harp and theorbo adding to the drama. Lux Musicae kept their offerings fresh by continually changing their instrumental colours – there were a dozen different recorders – and the many shades of London itself came vividly to life. This festival has a special life of its own.

Martin Dreyer