Orlando Gibbons

Great King of Gods (1617)

Fantasia a 3 (1620)

Glorious and Powerful God

See, see the world is incarnate

Cambridge plays host to some fascinating combinations of music and architecture. There is no shortage of unusual venues for performance: from opera in the natural history museum, choral recitals on punts, instrumental recitals in library, and even jazz in former cesspits. The combination room in St John’s College was the location, on Friday 4 November, for a short concert of the music of the late Tudor composer Orlando Gibbons, replete with singers and viols. The combination room, as the programme informs, was built between 1598-1602 and was previously known as the long gallery, for it was originally 148ft long prior to its segmentation. The wood-panelled room has much history too, being the venue for the treaty between England and France, and event that established the marriage of Charles I to Henrietta Maris. Later, in the 1940s, parts of the D-Day landings were planned in the room.

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J.S. Bach

Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben, BWV 8 (1724)

A recent poll of Classical music buyers by the BPI (The British Recorded Music Industry) returned an interesting answer: that the favourite composer of an overwhelming majority was Johann Sebastian Bach. An evergreen composer, his music is continually committed to disc by performers with new interpretations, and performed regularly in concerts, with perhaps the most of the performed works being the two Passions. The public interest in the composer was certainly in evidence on Saturday in a packed St John’s College Chapel.

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The advent of storing music digitally allowed consumers to carry a significant library of music on a player little larger than a CD. For the classical listener, with an ear to fidelity and musical quality rather than portability, new developments in delivering high-quality content are going to be of more interested. Two subscription access developments are the Naxos Music Library (recently updated with the EMI catalogue) and the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall. The NML is a great resource for discovering music with over 57,000 CDs available. However, it really only provides another means of accessing material already available. The Digital Concert differs from this in that it takes advantage of the latest technological developments to bring a new experience to listeners. The Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert is an excellent example of how classical music production has seized upon ways to use digital media to enhance and expand listener’s experience of the orchestra.

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Wigmore Hall, Friday 16 June.

Classical artists venturing into other musical styles rarely works. Listeners and critics are stuffy about classical ensembles taking on popular music, and some projects should probably never have got further than the first meeting. With two very significant classical repertoire releases on the Virgin Classic’s label, some would have thought that the Quatuor Ébène was committing artistic suicide, for a project to fill coffers rather than be an artistic statement. Not so, both on disc and live.

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