Music / Voice Rejoice! Salut! Baroque. At Wesley Uniting Church, October 24. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

For two deeply intense and enjoyable hours Salut! Baroque took a full audience at Wesley Uniting Church on a thoroughly absorbing trip through the nuances and byways of baroque music.

It was a very full program, ranging from names such as Bach and Telemann and Handel and Rameau to at least one rather lovely piece (the Catalan carol El Cant dels ocells/Song of the Birds) by Anonymous. A thorough and copious set of program notes helped guide the audience through the historic and stylistic maze of the pieces.

The large group’s instruments are of the period and the sound was rich, deep, lively and lush.

At the forefront much of the time was soprano Anna Fraser, whose voice showed considerable range and flexibility of styles. There’s a heck of a difference between John Dowland’s sober measured Can She Excuse My Wrongs (1597), sung early the program, and the more passionate concluding piece, Antonio Sartorio’s Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare in Egitto in 1676, aiming to seduce Julius Caesar. Fraser used that range superbly to make the dramatic difference. It was a demonstration of the label baroque not being all that homogenous.

Instruments, from recorders to baroque oboe, strings, guitar and theorbo came and went on and off stage, with the percussion and Monika Kornel’s ever reliable underlying harpsichord remaining. There was no need for narration but half an eye on the program  notes was handy for keeping on track.

We found out that Henry Purcell had a brother Daniel who also did some composing but seemed to prefer being an organist and we were treated to Marin Marais’ crisp Marche pour les Matelots, which became the basis of the English carol Masters in the Hall by way of becoming popular as music for dance.

An altogether great evening from which we came out knowing much more than when we went in. Which is as it should be.

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