<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <docID>327028</docID> <postdate>2024-08-19 09:23:18</postdate> <headline>Concert of scholarship and skilled playing, but…</headline> <body><p><img class="size-full wp-image-327032" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Bassoonist-Ben-Hoadley.-Photo-Peter-Hislop-resized.jpeg" alt="" width="900" height="599" /></p> <caption>Ben Hoadley playing a bassoon modelled on an instrument from the late 18<sup>th</sup> century. Photo: Peter Hislop</caption> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><span class="kicker-line">Music / Hammer Tech, Apeiron Baroque. At Wesley Uniting Church, August 18. Reviewed by <strong>GRAHAM McDONALD</strong>.</span></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Apeiron Baroque is a Canberra-based early music group, playing music of the baroque and classical periods on instruments of the period. </strong></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">The core of the ensemble is keyboard player Marie Searles and violinist John Ma.  They were joined for this concert by Ben Hoadley, playing a bassoon modelled on an instrument from the late 18<sup>th</sup> century. This had quite a different tonality to a modern bassoon, sounding as much like a horn as a reed instrument.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">This was a concert full of music by almost totally forgotten composers of the late 18<sup>th</sup> and early 19<sup>th</sup> centuries and conceived around the use of the fortepiano, played with great skill by Searles.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">This fortepiano was a way-point between the harpsichord of the baroque and the modern grand piano that evolved in the mid 19<sup>th</sup> century and has a tonality all its own. It certainly sounds like a piano, the strings being struck by hammers rather than plucked, but with hints of a harpsichord in the sound. Some of that might well be the way the music was written with stylistic hangover from the earlier roles of keyboards in the music.</p> <p><img class="size-full wp-image-327031" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Apeiron-Baroque.-Photo-Peter-Hislop-resized.jpeg" alt="" width="900" height="590" /></p> <caption>Apeiron Baroque... from left, John Ma, Marie Searles and Ben Hoadley. Photo: Peter Hislop</caption> <p style="font-weight: 400;">The music included piano and violin sonatas by French composer Jean-Frederick Edelmann (executed by the Revolution in 1794) and Englishman George Pinto (dead of consumption at 20 years old in 1806) with a trio sonata for bassoon, violin and piano by the Viennese composer Joeseph Michl (a friend of Mozart).</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">These larger works were separated by a delightful solo from Searles of a slow movement from a sonata by the Spanish composer Manuel de Nebra and a violin and bassoon duo by Joseph Fiala (another friend of Mozart). A surprise was a fiery violin solo by a wonderfully obscure Cossack composer Ivan Khandoshkin, which sounded more like a work of the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century and which led Ma to comment “quite different to Mozartâ€.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">This was, as we have come to expect from Apeiron Baroque, a concert of dedicated scholarship and highly skilled playing. It was cleverly programmed and, as usual, entertainingly introduced. It was all music from a 20-30 year period at the end of the 18<sup>th</sup> century and that was perhaps a limitation that made it a bit too scholarly and not quite varied enough.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"> </body>