More culture (is a hurdy-gurdy “culture”?)

Friday 13 Nov

This evening was a bit of a treat, as I attended a concert at the Sheldonian Theatre (pictured at right in daylight). For your architectural edification, the Sheldonian was designed by Christopher Wren and is used for university graduations. One half is semicircular and the other is a rectangle, and it has a painted ceiling that hides what is apparently a quite cunningly engineered ceiling structure to span the width of about 20m. With such a width, it thus has quite a small interior, and, with steeply tiered seating, there’s not much room for large posteriors!

Anyway, the concert involved the soprano Emma Kirkby who is famous for her work with early music, and the London Handel Players. They performed works by Vivaldi, Purcell, Rebel (never heard of him, but one of the pieces he wrote back in 1737 sounded surprisingly modern), and others less well known.

It was an excellent concert, and I can see why Emma Kirkby is so well-regarded. The quirky highlight for me, though, was the use of a hurdy-gurdy, which has aspects of piano accordion, bagpipes, violin, and wind-up toy all bound into one instrument … an instrument that needs tuning at the beginning of every piece! Basically the hurdy-gurdy-ist (I am not sure what the proper noun is for a person who plays a hurdy-gurdy) turns a handle, which in turn rotates a wheel that rubs against the strings and sets them vibrating in the same way that a violin bow vibrates the strings. Four of the strings are drone strings, and don’t change (though they aren’t used all at once), and then there are a whole bunch of keys like piano accordion keys that stop the remaining chanter strings at different lengths to make different notes (sort of like push-button fingers on a violin string). It was simultaneously amusing and impressive to hear a contemporaneous arrangement of part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Spring) played on hurdy-gurdy with orchestral ensemble.