The divine Dominique Labelle, Nic McGegan, and a few pals from Philharmonia Baroque lead off the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition with the kind of concert that you only wish came around more often. It’s programmed like an actual 18th-century recital, with two sets of songs by (or arranged by) Beethoven, Haydn, and Ignaz Pleyel (Haydn’s pupil), interspersed with instrumental numbers (but only one complete multi-movement piece: Haydn’s great A-Major Piano Trio, No. 32).
If you go, you’ll hear cool stuff like Franz Kotzwara’s dramatic sonata The Battle of Prague (1788), which was a huge hit in Regency England (Jane Austen owned a copy) and was played on concerts throughout the 19th Century; a romance from the seminal opéra-comique Le roi et le fermier (The king and the farmer,1762); and a barcarolle from a much later, opéra-comique, La dame blanche (1825).
This is a natural way to encounter the song settings of Haydn and Beethoven and discover some surpassingly entertaining music along the way. (Kotzwara’s Battle was a major source for dance tunes, often lifted and retitled). The concert’s bound to be a delight from start to finish.