BAROQUE music played like a cartoon? That sounds insulting, and I don’t intend to be. Not entirely, anyway. Eighteenth-century music, especially of the Vivaldi concerto variety, already has its inbuilt looney-tune traits: driving energy, for instance, and flamboyant instrumental gestures to conjure an emotional state in a few pungent notes.
What the four players of Red Priest do, in their frenetic stage show Red Hot Baroque, is crank up that energy to a manic level, and then expand those sparse gestures — into the realms of costume, lighting, film projection, and what might best be described as prancing round the stage — with all the aesthetic sensibility of Bugs Bunny and the heroic self-restraint of Sir Elton John. Or possibly vice versa.
From their bizarre Abba-meets-Rasputin costumes to their almost pathological determination to leave not a single bar of music unembellished by some “witty” flurry of notes, their show is such a whirlwind of blissfully self-confident vulgarity that, as a spectator, you either have to go with the flow or storm out in a froth of fogeyish indignation.
I stayed, and enjoyed myself up to a point. At its best, the playing is indeed red-hot virtuosic, especially from Piers Adams, a recorder player never happier than when tootling 90 notes to the second, sometimes on two recorders simultaneously. The adaptation of The Four Seasons — involving swirling snowstorms, thunderclaps and the mime of an entire stag hunt — is way over the top, but one has a sneaking suspicion that Vivaldi might have approved. And you could argue that hammy stagings of the same composer’s “Nightmare” Concerto and Robert Johnson’s Witches’ Dance (garnished with vocal cackles, naturally), only make explicit theatre out of what is implicit in the original music.
But humour and classical music are notoriously hard to combine, and some of Red Priest’s gags fell flatter than an elderly amateur tenor with the flu. Was it a good idea for the matronly cellist to pick up her instrument and strum it like a rock guitar, replete with what seemed distressingly like pelvic thrusts? Should the harpsichordist have been dissuaded by his friends or family from rolling on the floor and kicking his legs in the air? And why did we hear a snatch of the Elgar Cello Concerto, and an Indian raga, in the middle of Corelli? I merely ask.
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Still, there are thousands of ensembles churning out prim, pristine performances of Baroque music. Western civilisation will survive one that plays Bach for laughs. I just wish I had laughed more often.