Andrew Wilson-Dickson is a composer, pianist and conductor as well as author, teacher and string-player, trained at Cambridge and York. He is a pupil of John Lill (piano) and Nicholas Danby (organ). He came to Wales to work at the Welsh College of Music and Drama in 1984 and since then has informed his teaching (much of it in the field of early music) by playing and composing. Andrew now freelances, playing piano and continuo harpsichord for concerts all over the UK, appearing in festivals in Buxton, Swaledale, Tudeley and the Gower, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the York Late Music Festival, and abroad in Croatia and Trinidad. He also created the Welsh Baroque Orchestra, a professional band of period instruments which he directs and which is funded by the Welsh Assembly Government.

Andrew now spends significant time composing, as well as being chair of Composers of Wales. This year his music has been performed as far afield as Slovenia and Australia. As author, his Story of Christian Music has been published in more than ten languages, from Hungarian to Korean.

Claire Heaney studied to postgraduate level at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. She received the Daniel Emlyn Davies Award and won the Takemitsu Competition for performance in 1999. At the College Claire discovered and developed a keen interest in the baroque flute. As a result she is a member of several period ensembles and has played in many venues from St David’s Cathedral in West Wales to the Wigmore Hall in London. Claire is currently studying for a PhD in computational fluid dynamics.

Marc Elton is fortunate to have had an eclectic musical background which has enriched him as a player and a performer. This included his own rock band ‘Solstice’ with which he made many appearances at leading venues including The Marquee Club in London and the Glastonbury Festival. These days he is dedicated to the world of Baroque music but is equally at home playing jazz, bluegrass, classical, Celtic and Klezma.

Marc gained an Advanced Diploma from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with distinction, studying with Margaret Faultless and thereafter devoting himself to early music. Scholarships have enabled him to study both at Dartington and the Aldeburgh Britten/Pears Summer School. Marc leads the Welsh Baroque Orchestra and plays in various period instrument ensembles in Wales and the Southwest.

The Welsh Baroque Orchestra is the only group of its kind in Wales. It fulfils one of its creator’s ambitions: to provide a platform for talented Welsh players passionately committed to the sound-world of period instruments. Through its current Assembly funding it has been able to expand its activity, giving concerts all over Wales of familiar and unusual music from the baroque period. This year its programme includes the first performance for 300 years of an oratorio by Ziani, as well as a staged presentation in the Varazdin Baroque Evenings in Croatia of Handel’s oratorio Hercules.

The music we play this evening is common enough currency amongst modern audiences interested in music of the 18th century. But it’s worth considering for how long this music has been known. Without doubt the composer with the widest and earliest circulation in printed music is Corelli, as Roger North recounted in about 1726:

And last the conciertos came [in print], all which are to the musitians like the bread of life... and now thro’ the art of graving etching and printing, musick is come to great perfection, being thereby strangely propagated, much more than when all passed in manuscript, which were not onely hard to get, but often slovenly wrote.

It was unusual, perhaps unique, for music published in 1714 to remain common currency for several decades. The Eighth Concerto in the collection has an unusual addition to its title: ‘made for the Eve of Christmas’. Clearly this particular piece (with its added Pastorale recalling the music of shepherds on the Jerusalem hillsides on that first Christmas night) was intended for inclusion in Christmas liturgies, and has thus more strongly captured contemporary imagination.

Telemann, the most notable musician in Hamburg society – both sacred and secular - worked hard to write and print music in large quantities that all musicians could enjoy, and collections like the musical periodical ‘Der getreue Music-Meister’, or his published concertos ‘Musique de Table’ and sonatas ‘Essercizii musici’ were highly prized far beyond Hamburg. JS Bach, on the other hand, hardly published anything during his lifetime (certainly not the pieces we play tonight) and so his music was only ever a local phenomenon and quickly forgotten by a new generation of church-goers and courtiers. Indeed, what reaction there was to his music was often mixed. Certainly his extraordinary imagination, and the length and complexity of his pieces (the orchestral Suites and Concertos are good examples) did not endear his music to the casual listener.

By the later years of the 18th century, however, all this had disappeared under the weight of a new style of music directed at a new ticket-buying public general seeking entertainment through easy tunes and simple harmonies. Not until the late 19th century did this 18th-century music begin to be published again (and in Bach’s case be printed for the first time) and not until the advent of recordings did the average classical buff become aware of its amazing riches.

The final piece of the jigsaw that makes tonight’s concert possible was the revelation, around the 1960s, that the instruments on which this distant music was once played needed to be taken seriously, that the sound world that they created was perhaps a better match for the music than the one created by the instruments of Liszt or Mahler. So only in the last forty years have we heard some echo of the sounds that greeted the ears of courtiers in Brandenburg, church-goers in Rome or amateur musicians in Hamburg. Will this still be possible for audiences a further 300 years hence?

© Andrew Wilson-Dickson

The Welsh Baroque Orchestra for this evening:

violins:
Marc Elton*
Sue Plessner*
Lily Schlaen
Giovanna del Perugia
Liz Hodson
Sarah Askey
Rachel Wilson-Dickson

violas:
David Nash
Lucy Robinson

cellos:
Kate Ayres
Claudine Cassidy

double bass:
Tony Cleaton

flute:
Claire Heaney*

harpsichord:
Andrew Wilson-Dickson*

* also soloist