IT WAS hard to know what to expect from last night's concert at Kilkenny Arts Week. The performers were described as a "baroque trio" and originally listed as natural trumpet, soprano and harpsichord. Yet the repertoire they were to play ranged beyond the baroque to Sullivan (bits of Pirates of Penzance, Mikado, and so on).
What would this really amount to? A period instrument strike back, with G&S going baroque? A revolutionary development revealing that Sullivan had always secretly craved performance on natural trumpet and harpsichord?
The answer turned out to be both more and less. Kilkenny Arts Week provided the trio with what was publicly described as a "damaged" harpsichord. So parts of the programme that were to have featured the harpsichord featured the piano instead.
This, they argued, was really no bad thing, because the baroque music on the programme was actually being heard in arrangements from the 1830s, when a piano would have been used (though not, it must be said, anything which would have sounded like Kilkenny's modern concert grand with the lid down).
And Steele Perkins came clean about his "natural trumpet" being in fact a denatured instrument - he's drilled holes in it to allow him to play in the equal tempered tuning of a modern keyboard (he didn't, however, explain why he was planning to play with an equal tempered keyboard in the first place, rather than an instrument using a temperament current in the period of the music involved).
In any case, the harpsichord was amplified, so that it sounded like nothing on earth. I heard parts of it coming from the cathedral wall on my right, although the instrument was in front of me on the lefty of the stage. And the amplification disrupted the performance at one point, by developing a percussive mind of its own while the piano was being played.
The greatest absurdity was reached in a cantata by the little known Alessandro Melani, in which keyboards man Leslie Pearson switched to and fro between piano and harpsichord. The Sullivan, for the record, was accompanied on piano.
The best constituent of the evening was Steel Perkins' musically suave playing. His armoury included slide trumpet, cornet, animal horn and garden hose pipe, in a re run of parts of the brass history lesson he's amused audiences with before in Kilkenny.
The young Scottish soprano, Jeni Bern, took a while to settle down, after which her bright and clear toned singing of the baroque items was largely pleasurable. However, the indecipherability of her words proved an insurmountable barrier in the Sullivan.
