23-04-2025
Stankiewicz/Crowe review — dazzled by this five-star all-baroque evening
★★★★★
A top-level orchestra is so much greater than the sum of its parts that one often forgets that its parts — the individual players — are pretty sensational by themselves. This glorious, packed-out concert at the Wigmore Hall was a reminder.
The main box-office draw was probably the soprano Lucy Crowe, and in an all-baroque programme she certainly wasn't outshone. She delivered a series of testing Bach and Handel arias with such grace, agility, theatricality and wit that the notes seemed to leap off the page, and across the centuries, as though the ink were still wet.
In the Handel numbers she was required to be a raging sorceress, goaded to dastardly threats by a fanfaring trumpet, or a cooing bird, fluttering delicately above the stave, or a tempestuous lover. Bach, of course, required a more chaste parade of personae: a joyous bride and a soul searching for Christ. Whatever the character, Crowe made it utterly gripping within seconds.
Yet her performance was less than half the story of this concert. Next to her, and frequently matching her for razzle, dazzle and endlessly inventive trills and ornaments, was Olivier Stankiewicz, released from duty as the principal oboist of the London Symphony Orchestra and seemingly determined to cram as many prestissimo semiquavers as possible into his night of freedom.
And alongside him were 11 fellow instrumentalists, also drawn from many distinguished ensembles and clearly revelling in this exuberant feast of 18th-century chamber music. Prime among them was the Polish violinist Maria Wloszczowska, usually to be found leading the Royal Northern Sinfonia in Gateshead. She was a spirited and imaginative foil for Stankiewicz in the Bach Double Concerto for oboe and violin. She also established a wild, rustic atmosphere in a Vivaldi Oboe Concerto that was twisted this way and that in mood and tempo, and all the more exhilarating for it.
