Filmed concerts vary in the degree to which the visuals add significant further value to the remote-listening experience, but two that unequivocally deliver on being compelling viewing are newly up on the London International Festival of Early Music website, captured in St Michael and All Angels Church, Blackheath, during the festival’s November 2024 edition.

First, ‘Telemann Goes East’, a special concert collaboration between festival director and recorder player Erik Bosgraaf and filoBarocco – violinist Francesco Facchini, lutenist Marco Baronchelli and cellist Carlo Maria Paulesu – which saw them take the Polish folk-dance melodies Telemann heard and wrote down in taverns during his time as court composer in Sorau (now Z˙ary, Poland) and use them to make educated guesses on what the original, non-cleaned-up tavern performances might have sounded like. On paper, their resultant programme of ‘virtuoso speculative music’ keeps its cards close to its chest: four ‘acts’, each comprised of eight or so dances, most of which are polonaises. In reality, though, it’s four kaleidoscopic pub sets within which each dance rolls seamlessly into the next; and while it opens sounding as one might expect of a Telemann-meets-folk programme from a baroque ensemble – a lilting, courtly-meets-folk, simple polonaise – things quickly increase in inventiveness, playfulness, originality and surprise: moods and tempos are soon switching between dreamy stasis, tender lilt and rhythmic raucousness; the raw material’s tonal melodicism becomes spiced with sensuous quarter-tones and dissonance; melody and harmony are rock-solid one minute and unravel the next.

The accompanying visual feast is just as multifaceted: Bosgraaf working his way through a fast-changing succession of recorders from bass to soprano; novel ways in which they use their instruments for dramatic effect, from Baronchelli playing his lute upside down to bow on the nut and create a metallic-toned drone, to Paulescu slipping a piece of paper between his strings to simulate a martial snare drum when tapped with his bow, to extended recorder techniques such as multiphonics, glissandos and overblowing; and always there’s the human element of their intent awareness and enjoyment of each other and the music’s organic development. Jump to 49'00" to hear them playing for laughs, tiptoeing through a passage they pepper with boings, quacks, squeaks and dissonance. Or jump to 1hr 9' for a deliciously airy, toe-tappingly syncopated melody coloured with string pizzicato and flutter-tonguing. At one point the four of them interrupt a merrily lilting dance to break into a lustily sung a cappella interlude.

Is it what really would have been habitually zinging around the rafters in your average 18th century Polish pub? Sometimes one wonders, but without remotely caring. These four’s vital, dynamic dance is timeless.

An entirely different vision of the recorder is then presented by the 11 players of Amsterdam-based recorder consort The Royal Wind Music. Their programme of Renaissance music ‘The Orange Tree Courtyard’, created and arranged by ensemble member María Martínez Ayerza, takes the audience on an imaginary walk in and around Seville Cathedral through a mix of dance instrumental and sacred vocal music – some original versions, some transcriptions and improvisations – ranging from ancient anonymous chants to the work of composers such as Pedro de Escobar (c1465‑after 1535), Francisco Guerrero (1528‑99), Miguel de Fuenllana (fl1553‑78) and Alonso Lobo (1555‑1617). Simultaneously, the audience is walked around the recorder family itself, along with the musical, social and religious conventions of the time. Spoken explanations introduce each fresh section, and even watching remotely you feel drawn into these.

Performance-wise, the first thing to say is what a ravishing sound this consort makes. Soft, rich, warmly mellifluous, balanced and wide – so beautifully balanced and wide – in a way that fills the church. One of the visual treats, beyond the size range of recorders, is their varying ensemble constellations and what that does to the listening experience. One surprise comes when they form a circle, some players thus with their backs to the audience, resulting in a central column of sound that rises up and fills the church in an entirely different way.

One of the most interesting and attractive musical contrasts comes in their section connected to the area of the cathedral behind the grave of bibliographer and cosmographer Hernando Colón (1488-1539, illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus) behind the cathedral choir, where they contrast Enrique Foxer’s (pre-1488) sombrely atmospheric Pues con sobra de tristura, in a historically informed Renaissance recorder quartet setting for bass in C, two tenors and a G alto, with their ‘modern’ tutti arrangement of a later anonymous late 15th-century dance, Niña y viña, this one occupying three different registers, sopraninos chirruping and twirling up in the heights, and the bass instruments used not just for sounded notes but also for percussion. Atmospheric in a different way is their section devoted to the Chapter House featuring music by Alonso Mudarra (c1510‑1580), who was alive as it was actually being built. All in all, Renaissance recorder consort-playing doesn’t get more accomplished and multifacetedly fascinating than this.

Lovers of the Romantic violin concerto are also well served this month. Medici.tv is now carrying Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan’s February 19 debut with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto under Rafael Payare. When so often it’s this work’s radiance and showmanship into which soloists tend to lean, Khachatryan’s first movement strikes as much for his seriousness, and for the overall quietness of his aura and often dynamics – accentuated by regular rubato and pauses, met with attentive flexibility by Payare and the orchestra – as for his clean-lined precision, placing Tchaikovsky’s melodicism centre stage. Payare’s ear-grabbing moments include the sense of instability and danger to his phrasing at 9'43", and his sudden whoosh of an accelerando as they enter the first movement’s final straight.

Their central Canzonetta is taken daringly slow at points, but far from it sagging, it’s tensely emotive stuff – followed by a finale over which, finally, everyone’s hair is let down, and tempos are cranked up, Khachatryan’s virtuosically rapid dance switching engagingly between rustic rough and polished precision. For an encore, he goes for a softly hypnotic reading of a 10th-century Armenian piece, Grigor Narekatsi’s lamentational Havun havun – leaving him so emotional that he’s barely able to crack a smile of acknowledgement at the resultant applause. Very moving.

Also on medici.tv is US violinist Randall Goosby’s January 17 debut with Ottowa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra under Alexander Shelley, performing Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No 2 in D minor at the National Arts Centre. This concerto may have been completed in 1952 but its its tonal, Romanticism-tinged, jazz- and Spiritual-inspired melodicism sounds more like an American answer to the Tchaikovsky Concerto, and it’s songfully played by Goosby with his easy, polished style, enjoying each and every blues notes and inflection as he goes, with Shelley and the orchestra equally flexibly and songfully by his side all the way. The two works preceding the Price concerto are also worth catching: a playful, airily lyrical Strauss Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, followed by a work commissioned in response to it, Canadian composer John Estacio’s Avé, lovingly performed, which similarly makes much of orchestral soloists and chamber dialogue, but now in the context of Barber-esque open and scrunchily suspended harmonies and off-beat rhythms.

Over on the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall you’ll find Frank Peter Zimmermann and Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk’s dynamic, momentum-filled January 31 performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto – a glorious watch for the communal warmth and enjoyment in everyone’s faces and body language, and an equal glorious listen, Zimmermann bringing a mix of bright, powerful noblesse, passionate rhetoric and even wildness at points, while the orchestra play truly as if it’s their music. You could hear a pin drop in the sustained silence following their slow movement. In the finale, Zimmermann is a master of mercurial mood-shifts, and also a visual treat through the granite-edged clarity and power of his consecutive down-bows, and the debonair twist to his mouth that appears over more playfully rapid passagework. As with the LIFEM, it’s fabulous playing you can’t take your eyes off.

The events

London International Festival of Early Music

lifem.org/stream-concerts/

Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (Khachatryan; Montreal SO / Payare)

medici.tv

Price Violin Concerto No 2 (Goosby; National Arts Centre Orch / A Shelley)

medici.tv

Elgar Violin Concerto (FP Zimmermann; BPO / Slobodeniouk)

digitalconcerthall.com