Music / Hammer Tech, Apeiron Baroque. At Wesley Uniting Church, August 18. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

Apeiron Baroque is a Canberra-based early music group, playing music of the baroque and classical periods on instruments of the period.

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^th century. This had quite a different tonality to a modern bassoon, sounding as much like a horn as a reed instrument.

This was a concert full of music by almost totally forgotten composers of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries and conceived around the use of the fortepiano, played with great skill by Searles.

This fortepiano was a way-point between the harpsichord of the baroque and the modern grand piano that evolved in the mid 19^th 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.

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).

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^th century and which led Ma to comment “quite different to Mozart”.

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^th century and that was perhaps a limitation that made it a bit too scholarly and not quite varied enough.