Wooden bar with bar stools, pub tables and chairs, and those cute café table lamps made of colored glass. There’s even one in the wing. A large wooden room with a fireplace is projected on the back canvas. It is the setting of the new program of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble: Purcell goes Celtic. The English baroque composer Henry Purcell in the Irish pub, so to speak. The intention is to merge Purcell’s music and Irish folk music in fifteen songs.
The NBE invited the young Irish singer Piaras Ó Lorcáin (2003) to perform traditional Irish songs; a striking appearance, who sings songs in Gaelic with a wonderfully richly colored baritone. He directs the words, with their characteristic nasal r-sounds, mainly to the floor, with one hand in his pocket and his eyes always firmly closed; fitting in with the centuries-old sean-nós-style.
Pianist and composer Julian Schneemann, son of NBE leader and still enthusiastic oboist Bart Schneemann (since 1988), wrote the arrangements. You can still hear fragments of recognizable themes from Purcell, but Julian Schneemann indeed succeeds well in blending the baroque style back and forth with Irish folk dances; handsome and cheerful. Only the instrumentation could have been more exciting. Almost all the instruments play simultaneously, while an ensemble like NBE (with one of each wind instrument) offers the opportunity to spotlight the individual characters of the instruments.
Irish bagpipes
A highlight of the program is an improvisation by the second guest musician, bodhranplayer Robbie Walsh, who appears to be able to get all the notes from at least an entire octave from his Irish frame drum and varies with that on ‘O, when the saints’.
As a classical musician, having to struggle through Irish folk dances cannot be easy. That is unfortunately visible. The intended relaxed pub atmosphere with cheerfully improvising musicians does not match the concentration of the musicians, who are almost entirely focused on the sheet music. As a result, pre-arranged stage cues, such as ‘here we are enthusiastically stamping on the ground’, often seem to be forgotten by half of the ensemble. The division of musicians in the doubt camp (‘right now?’) versus musicians in the better-late-than-never camp (‘oh now already?’) causes wavering tension and making music at two-thirds power. It’s doubt you won’t find in an Irish pub, and it makes the evening feel more like a run-through rehearsal than a finished product. The first performances of the NBE such as this are often included in the playlist as a ‘pre-premiere’, so there is a chance that the interplay will become tighter as the tour progresses.
The cheerful exception to this is violinist Emmy Storms, the only one from the permanent NBE core who clearly feels like a fish in water, by heart. fiddles and really improvises with pleasure. With her you see the changes between Purcell’s prescribed notes and the dancing atmospheres of Irish folk music in a day-night difference in her posture: from neatly upright during Purcell’s themes, she bends forward in her instrument, grinning from ear to ear. , as she powerfully strikes the first Irish note. Her interplay with the young one Uilleann pipesplayer (Irish bagpipe) Cian Smith, the third guest, is exciting. On Thursday they are the only musicians who look at each other, instead of at their sheet music.
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Julian Schneemann: ‘You hear life in this music, that is the power’