So on Saturday night at St.Olave’s CE I finally managed to catch a concert in the Apocryphonia series.  It was titled Brews, Beauties and Brawlers and was billed as “classical” meets “punk”.  It was a collection of pieces for piano, solo voice and/or choir and organiser Alexander Capellazzo had recruited four voices of each type with soloists coming from the group.  Narmina Afaniyeva was at the piano.  Everybody (and some of the audience) had dressed for the occasion!

The music was largely drinking songs or love songs from the 17th and 19th/early 20th century.  The featured composers were Purcell, Coleridge-Taylor  (the composer not the albatross dude), Vaughan Williams and Stanford.  The conclusion, and the longest piece on the programme, was Charles Villiers Stanford’s Phaudrig Crohoore; a choral ballad of 1896 to text by Sheridan le Fanu (the vampire guy) about a very large Irishman who falls in love, drinks, fights and gets killed in the 1798 rising.

And if one Le Fanu work about. getting pointlessly killed in 1798 were not enough the concert opened with an excerpt from Stanford’s opera Shamus O’Brien sung by John Holland and chorus.  After that there was a substantial break from Oirishry with some acerbic songs about drink and prostitution by Purcell featuring Thera Barclay, Grace Quinsey, Lucia Santilly and David Walsh as soloists plus Stanford’s Molly Brannigan sung by Alexander and two extracts from Vaughan William’s Sir John in Love; “Sigh No More Ladies” with Catharin Carew and “Back and Side Go Bare” from the chorus.

More Vaughan Williams after the break with The Sky Above the Roof sung by Jada Alexiou.  This sounds a lot like the music in his two great song cycles which, to my mind, elevated it above some of the parlour song like material like the three Coleridge-Taylor songs to texts by Heine that followed.  These were nicely sung by Alessia Naccarato, Catharin Carew and Máiri Demings but I’m a bit allergic to Victorian/Edwardian respectability.  Give me the roistering, rogering Restoration any day!

Narmina treated us to some very nice piano solo music from Coleridge -Taylor before the big number.  In Phaudrig Crohoore the “hero” was sung by Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega with David Walsh as his nemesis Michael O’Hanlon and much energetic work from the ensemble.  I could have used text for this but it wasn’t hard to fathom the gist.  There’s lots of drinking, O’Hanlon marries Crohoore’s squezze but the latter causes ructions in the church before being kicked out and dying womantically during the rising and “the green grass grows over his grave” (of course).  Very nicely done but I’m also rather allergic to the Celtic Twilight so not entirely my thing.

Apocryphonia’s mission is to programme vocal music that nobody else is doing which is admirable, if risky.  Predictably I liked some pieces more than others but, all in all, it was a good show by a talented bunch of singers.  And if you think this rep is obscure their next concert on May 12th and 16th features music from Antwerp from the early decades of the Eighty Years War.