Un'accademia per Dresda

Last night, the tiny Chiesa di San Gottardo here in Carmine Superiore received a visit.

Not quite by angels, but by perhaps the next best thing in the form of the Duo Sans Souci, all the way from Padua, playing 17th/18th-century German composers (Falckenagen, Weiss, Hagen, Telemann, Baron and Heinichen) on period instruments, oboe, oboe d'amore and tenor oboe, lute and archlute. What 'period instruments' actually means, I'll leave to the experts. The duo is part of the 5-man Ensemble Sans Souci, but I guess getting a full-size harpsichord up here would have been beyond us all.

In my metropolitan days, I would fall out of my office and into concerts of baroque music in the 18th-century St Paul's in Covent Garden, and was captivated by the way the music became of a piece with the architecture of the era that produced it. (I wonder if anyone has studied the phenomenon of how period instruments and music work with period architecture and acoustics?)

It's truly a heart-lifting experience to hear the unmistakeable harmonies of baroque and rococo drifting out of our church to mingle with the distant rumblings of thunder across the lake. It would be even more marvellous, perhaps, to hear some early medieval music, music that perhaps the likes of Carmine would never have heard in its time, but certainly which would chime with the medieval architecture.

And if that happens, perhaps we can get a baby-sitter so that I, too, can go into the church and listen, instead of chasing noisy children round the churchyard, hissing like a goose.

Thank-you to Guiseppe Nalin and Pierluigi Polato for hauling their instruments up the hill and making such a memorable evening for us all. And to the Comune of Cannobio and the other sponsors for sponsoring and organising.