Truly, Madly Baroque

Monday 19 September, 7.30pm
St Thomas Church, Lymington

After their recent foray into the world of gypsy music with their classical-chart-topping Baroque Bohemians project, Red Priest return to their origins with a stunning programme of truly baroque classics, arranged and performed with their trademark energy, virtuosity and (in the best baroque sense) madness!

Programme

VIVALDI Concerto in A minor (orig. B minor) RV580
J.S. BACH Adagio from Sonata in G minor BWV 109
ALBINONI Concerto in D minor op 9 no 2
TELEMANN Largo and Presto from Concerto in E minor
HANDEL Lascia Ch’Io Czadas

Piers Adams, recorders
Adam Summerhayes, violin
Angela East, cello
David Wright, harpsichord

Red Priest

Red Priest is the only early music group in the world to have been compared in the press to the Rolling Stones, Jackson Pollock, the Marx Brothers, Spike Jones and the Cirque du Soleil. This extraordinary acoustic foursome has been described by music critics as ‘visionary and heretical’, ‘outrageous yet compulsive’, ‘wholly irreverent and highly enlightened’, ‘completely wild and deeply imaginative’, with a ‘red-hot wicked sense of humour’ and a ‘break-all-rules, rock-chamber concert approach to early music’.

Founded in 1997, and named after the flame-haired priest, Antonio Vivaldi, Red Priest has given several hundred sell-out concerts in many of the world’s most prestigious festivals, including the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Moscow December Nights Festival, Schwetzingen Festival, Prague Spring Festival, Ravinia Festival, Bermuda Festival, and in most European countries, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and throughout North and Central America, to which they have toured over 40 times.  The group has been the subject of hour-long TV profiles for NHK (Japan) and ITV (UK) – the latter for the prestigious South Bank Show in 2005, which documented the launch of the Red Hot Baroque Show, an electrifying marriage of old music with the latest light and video technology.

Red Priest comprises recorder player Piers Adams, violinist Adam Summerhayes, cellist Angela East and harpsichordist David Wright. These musicians have redefined the art of period performance, creating a virtual orchestra through their creative arrangements, performing from memory with swashbuckling virtuosity, heart-on-sleeve emotion and compelling stagecraft. Their repertoire ranges from obscure 17th century sonatas to the most famous works of Bach and Vivaldi, all presented in imaginative programmes with filmic titles: ‘Priest on the Run’, ‘Nightmare in Venice’, ‘Pirates of the Baroque’, ‘Johann, I’m Only Dancing’.

In 2008 Red Priest launched its own record label, Red Priest Recordings, which is now the home for all of the recordings of the ensemble and its members, and has attracted much attention in the music press worldwide. The label is distributed worldwide by Nimbus.  The group’s most recent release, The Baroque Bohemians, reached No.1 in the UK Classical Charts in 2017.