Music for me and for so many others is not just the Shakespearean food of love but the food of life itself. Music richly accompanies our memories, colours our passions, soothes our sorrows and heightens our joys. How sad it is then that the on-going pandemic is cruellest with this art. Writers and readers may pursue their activities in solitude and artists paint their canvases without spectators. Music, however, pines for shared interaction more than most arts: indeed, the playing of members in a symphony orchestra is one of the sublimest social collaborations known to mankind.

It was, therefore, with the greatest penchant that I attended a concert given as part of the ‘Settecento Musicale a Lucca’ (‘Eighteenth century at Lucca’) festival in the city’s superbly huge barn of a church, San Francesco, whose re-opening to the public after a three-year restoration we witnessed in 2014.

(See my posts on that momentous event at:

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/magisterial-monastery/

And at:

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/new-life-to-an-old-quarter/)

This was the programme:

Music yearns for an audience, even if socially-distanced on appropriately marked seats music, even if husband and wife are asked, as we were, to be seated with a couple of vacant places between us!

Music also requires just one player to entrance that audience whether it be on a piano or, in the case of the late afternoon’s opening item, a solo violin. Da Won Chang’s interpretation of J. S. Bach’s violin partita in D minor was beautifully played and its last movement, the famous chaconne, utterly riveting.

It also demonstrated how good so many musicians are coming out of specialist courses at Lucca’s ‘Boccherini’ conservatoire.

The ‘Animando’ chamber orchestra, conducted by Stefano Teani, followed with a group of four pieces by Mozart, Tartini, Vivaldi and Durante which displayed the astonishing variety of eighteenth century Italian music. The Neapolitan school was represented by Durante and Venice (naturally) by Vivaldi. Austrian Mozart spent two of his most formative youthful years in Italy where he assimilated the exceptional melodic qualities of that country’s music. His divertimento K136 remains one of my favourite pieces and it was very agreeably played by the orchestra. Vivaldi is best known for his concerti composed for a variety of solo instruments but those for orchestra are equally good. This one was played with particular verve and ‘authenticity’ despite its not being performed on period instruments and with no harpsicord continuo present. But then the new fashion is now steering towards a question of style rather than mere ‘authentic instruments’.

Throughout this performance Animando’s instrumental balance was excellent, defeating any confrontation with the somewhat cavernous interior in which it performed. For particular praise was the double-bass playing by Valentina Ciardelli, one of Lucca conservatoire’s most distinguished graduates and one who has laudably established herself as a player and teacher of that neglected emperor of instruments in our London borough of Greenwich.

The concert’s second half was played by the ‘Luigi Boccherini’ chamber orchestra under the multifaceted musician Luca Bacci who is also the director of Lucca cathedral’s Santa Cecilia choir.

To demonstrate how Johann Sebastian Bach’s development was strongly influenced by Italian music Vivaldi’s concerto for four violins RV580 was played: the prototype for Bach’s recreation in his own four harpsichord concerto. Of particular interest to me was a very dashing symphony by Puccini – not the ‘La Bohème’ fellow, of course, but his grandfather Antonio. Music does run in so many families: just think of Bach and Mozart, for instance.

The acoustics of San Francesco are surprisingly good as befits a mammoth shoebox of a church without any side aisles. Baroque music demands a moderate resonance and I felt the building was well suited to the eighteenth century repertoire.

It was wonderful to return to the ‘concert hall’ in this lovely building after such a long deprivation; I realised that this was the first concert I’d been to since February. It was also an especial frisson to realise that we were hearing the music of Boccherini in the same church where he lies buried.

Perhaps the concert might have added a work by another of Lucca’ great musical geniuses, Geminiani, who as this inscription states taught the brits how to play the violin properly!

(Incidentally the dedication was written by the noted violinist and quartet leader Adolfo Betti, grandfather of Massimo Betti, Bagni di Lucca’s well-known chemist.)

There are a few more concerts in this series which has been brought to fruition in perhaps one of the most difficult years for music ever since the bombings of Milan’s la Scala and Dresden’s Semper opera houses during the last war.

Indeed, I had a vague intimation that this was how Myra Hess’s famous concerts in London’s National Gallery must have felt like during the Second World War when instead of being bombarded by a virus the populace had to confront incendiaries and mortars.

(Saint Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio – a stained glass window in the concert’s church)

As in all cases prior booking is required since numbers are limited and masks must be worn at all times and temperatures must be taken, as is written on the admission ticket…