The English Concert, Alice Coote, Wigmore Hall

A crack team showing its emotional side in a programme of love and death

by Alexandra CoghlanThursday, 28 October 2010

Alice Coote: A muscular champion for the emotional causes of Handel and Monteverdi

There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.

Coote's muscular mezzo was built for this music, its shadowy corners and powerful extremes of lower register.

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Alice Coote, Christian Blackshaw, Wigmore Hall review – deep feeling and high drama

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