Critic’s Notebook: Barokksolistene and their Alehouse Sessions at the Konzerthaus

Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene The Alehouse Sessions (Rubicon, 2017) US | UK | DE

Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene The Image of Melancholie (BIS SACD, 2014) US | UK | DE

Jolly Musicke Till You Drop

Hip vibes at the Norwegian baroque hoedown

For the most part, the crowds pouring into the Konzerthaus on Thursday evening surged up the grand staircase straight into the Great Hall: Mahler’s Ninth, Rattle conducting! The high temple of music was calling. Those who took a turn a little further down the foyer, meanwhile, found considerably lighter fare waiting behind the doors of the Mozart-Saal. Nothing lowbrwo, mind you—Bjarte Eike and his Norwegian Barokksolistene are a superb early music outfit. But their motto (“It’s just old pop music”) already hints at the fact that the promised Alehouse Sessions probably aren't too darn serious.

This baroque watering hole promised Henry Purcell, English shanties, dance, ballads, and traditional tunes. You’d need to have known your Purcell pretty well, though, to pick him out from the charming tangle of virtuosity, comedy, and kitsch. The dramatically—even theatrically—conceived program, about ten years old now, cheerfully plops Purcell’s "Virgin Queen" next to a sea shanty with a Bach riff rising suddenly from the hand harmonica. Bass, percussion, and guitar solos are handled the way they’d be in a jazz club.

The result is less "classical" than when Berlin’s Lautten Compagney tackles similar material, and not as relentlessly dramatized as comparable projects from Ireland’s Heresy Records. It’s just a bunch of cool old dads in mildly hipster=casual carb, noticeably graying hair, beers in hand, having fun with the music and goofing around a good deal. Who could possibly be curmudgeon enough to hold that against them—even if the slow-motion fight scene staged at the end finally tipped this early-baroque hoedown definitively into slapstick territory. Well, if clap-alongs and audience participation were not your thing, then you might have felt a sense of mild vicarious embarrassement. As it was, everyone got the right turn at the Konzerthaus; the crowd in the reasonably well-filled Mozart-Saal positivley lapped it up and responded with enthusiasm to everything that was on offer. So much so, Barokksolistene could almost have forgone the plants in the audience, that goated the audience into the right responses.

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