Red Priest put on brilliant display at The Courtyard (From Hereford Times)

Red Priest put on brilliant display at The Courtyard

1:43pm Friday 29th January 2010

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All music was once modern music. The best music of the high Baroque period was imaginative, cutting edge stuff, designed to entertain and inspire, to delight and enthral. One of the stars of the age was the flamboyant Venetian composer and violinist Antonio Vivaldi. An ordained priest, he devoted his life to music, achieving near rock-star celebrity throughout Europe, where he became known as “The Red Priest” because of his flame-red hair.

Baroque composers were notorious for pirating each other’s works, and in The Courtyard last Thursday piracy was the evening’s theme. The four instrumentalists of the group Red Priest are no less flamboyant than the genius that inspired them. Under red lighting and sporting red tunics over fetishistic black leather pants, they grouped around a red harpsichord to bring us a shipload of Baroque treasure – some real, some counterfeit – in a display of sheer brilliance, performed entirely from memory. Like a musical Johnny Depp, the energetic recorder player Piers Adams took command, executing mind-blowing acrobatic feats on his array of different-sized pipes, while the helmsman – cellist Angela East – responded to his every order with intriguingly dead-pan, yet masterly skill. Violinist Julia Bishop buckled her blonde and beautiful swash with strutting magnificence, and master-at-arms Howard Beach rattled the ducats in his scarlet treasure chest with well-deserved relish.

Despite the zany context, musical integrity was never compromised. The instruments were authentic, the style was correct, the musicianship impeccable, the wit beguiling and the entertainment total. A triumph.

John Rushby-Smith

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