The English Concert, Alice Coote, Wigmore Hall

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.

To the passions of love and death – those stalwart emotional bookends of the classical tradition – was added ecstatic frenzy in the form of La Folia, a floor-filling, crowd-pleasing concert opener if ever there was one. The "Hit Me, Baby, One More Time" of its day, this popular tune (whose Hispanic origins were made delightfully explicit in an opening outing on solo guitar) retained all its percussive knock and thump in the hands of The English Concert. Led from the front by a swaying and smiling Rachel Podger, the virtuoso shock and awe passed around the ensemble, who played with all the instinctive fervour of a Tzigane gypsy band.

From the first stabbingly dissonant semitone of Monteverdi’s extended arioso-recitative “Lasciatemi morire” however, we found ourselves in a rather darker world. A selection of vocal music encompassing this sole surviving scene from Monteverdi’s lost opera L’Arianna, two Dowland lute songs and Handel’s epic-in-miniature solo cantata “La Lucrezia”, chose to showcase the unexpected, wilfully ugly-beautiful intensity of which this repertoire is capable.

Coote’s muscular mezzo was built for this music; its shadowy corners and powerful extremes of lower register are rarely so thoroughly explored on the opera stage. Aided by the unobtrusive support of Harry Bicket and his continuo musicians, she was allowed the freedom to deconstruct and reconstruct the emotional trajectory of Monteverdi’s heroine, “The fate of one with too much love and too much faith”, along her own lines. Dissonance and consonance became part of a single continuum of expression, as the harmonic expectations of our ears were reframed by Bicket’s intelligent embellishments and Coote’s technical assurance.

Tracing the parallel tradition of Dowland over the familiar lines of Monteverdi’s music was a neat piece of programming, highlighting the flexibility and fluid emotionalism of the two contemporaries, as yet unrestricted by the conventions that would come to dominate Baroque vocal music. “In darkness let me dwell” continued both the sombre mood and arioso dramatics of the Monteverdi, though stripping back the accompaniment to a single theorbo (William Carter). The sheer size and heft of Coote’s voice proved unsuited however to the flightier, more coy affectations of “Come again sweet love doth now invite”, whose charms at times were lost in a too-epic treatment.

Providing the extrovert counterbalance to the interiority of the vocal music were two concertos. Vivaldi’s C minor Concerto for Cello was efficiently dispatched by Jonathan Manson, but it was the extraordinary Concerto in D for Violin, “Il Grosso Mogul”, with Podger returning as soloist, that proved the real talking point with its provocative excesses.

Reinstating the composer’s own cadenzas and a substitute second movement of extreme virtuosity, flamboyance and authenticity came together in rare fashion. Through Podger’s generous and matter-of-fact delivery it was Vivaldi’s innovations that drew the attention. The audaciously extended closing cadenza (framed by just a few bars by way of orchestral conclusion) and athletic feats of technique were connected by a more progressive harmonic language than is characteristic, epitomised by the fey major/minor uncertainty of the opening.

The evening reached its real climax in the Handel. An operatic miniature, its breathless vocal demands and delicately coloured orchestration brought the concert’s disparate elements together in a suitably epic climax. Telling of the rape and suicide of Lucrezia, the cantata’s freeform arioso represents the musical fulfilment of both Dowland and Monteverdi’s dramatic writing, retaining the deconstructed immediacy but gaining for the first time a truly operatic release. Coote and The English Concert are a crack team, and the risk of ending an evening on such desperation (the cantata staggers into silence after Lucrezia stabs herself) became a masterful coup de theatre.

For all the death and ardour on display last night, it was the communicative passions of the ensemble that proved most compelling. A constant flow of gesture and response unites The English Concert in a relationship that is the equal of any operatic romance.

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