Arcangelo Members Lounge

We’ve performed and recorded music by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Marcello, Boccherini, Scarlatti, Valentini, Stradella, Corelli, Buxtehude, Telemann – and a delightfully crafty Buxtehude reconstruction by Alon Schab. 166 musicians were engaged across all projects, reaching a live audience of around 5,000 and thousands more through EU radio broadcasts of performances from Hungary and Finland. We’ve also seen the release of a new album – ‘Sacroprofano’ with Tim Mead – which has already scored some 55,000 streams on Spotify alone and rave reviews around the world.

Then there’s been our fundraising, quite on another level compared to previous years, with over £200,000 raised across all our appeals. Within that sum, the returning admixture of Trust and Foundation funding for the first time in five years has been especially welcome, both for the value of the support and for the implicit recognition of the quality and value of our work. We’ve also completely relaunched our programme for the Arcangelo Friends, with eight varied events helping to drive a 40% growth in Friends Scheme membership year on year.

So much for the quantity, but what of the quality? That, too, has been abundant. We’ve made an unprecedentedly detailed chamber music film with director Andrew Staples and the team at Classical Films in Sir Christopher Wren’s library at Trinity College Cambridge, where nobody had ever filmed music before. We’ve made only the second-ever complete recording of Buxtehude’s chamber music, and the first to offer a reconstruction of one sonata left in fragment. We’ve made the first studio recording in a quarter of a century by a British ensemble of Handel’s glorious late oratorio ‘Theodora’, got two volumes into the first-ever complete recording on period instruments and on authentic sources of the cello concerti of Boccherini, and made the first authentically-scaled recordings of four of Handel’s consistently misinterpreted ‘Chandos Anthems’. I’m confident that every single one of these recording projects will set new standards on release.

Our work has been rich in partnership and collaboration, notably a co-production of Bach’s ‘St John Passion’ with our friends at Finnish Baroque Orchestra, and also in next-generation talent. We’ve been delighted to welcome three new talented instrumentalists to our Arcangelo New Ensemblists programme – and to welcome back all three members of the programme’s first cohort to various projects over the year. We’re frankly lucky to be able to have them because they’ve identified a total of over 20 subsequent career breaks and opportunities within six months of graduation which they directly ascribe to their membership of Arcangelo’s scheme.

It all adds up to a superb achievement – and a frankly remarkable one when you consider that Arcangelo has no office and no full-time staff. Our little team operates a completely virtual office, making it all happen amongst a host of other commitments including further studies, festival management, venue management, digital marketing, media management, and performing careers. The freest radical of all is of course Jonny, whose schedule of wider engagements took on a whole new dimension this year with his announcement as the 15^th Director of the Handel and Haydn Society, the longest continuously performing arts organisation in the United States and a leading light in the US period performance scene.

It’s Jonny, finally, who we all have to thank. Arcangelo is, fundamentally, Jonny and his musicianship and approach. Quietly but unfailingly, his deep-rooted musical sensibilities ensure that every project, from a trio sonata to a Bach Passion, opens and proceeds within a shared space of concentration, application and awareness that simply but compellingly bids each and every participant to give their best while admitting the best from each other. We’ve come to call this our ‘chamber ethos’ though Jonny’s also memorably referred to it as ‘musical sudoku’ – whatever you call it, this is the Arcangelo difference which starts in the rehearsal studio and proceeds to create what one of this season’s musicians described to us as “some of the most profoundly rewarding music-making I’ve ever been involved in.”

• Director – Will Hazell
• Audio Producer – Myles Eastwood
• Assistant Director – Sanjoli Malani
• Gaffer – Benjamin Leggett
• Steadicam Operator – Dan Starborg
• Camera Operator – Oli Robertshaw
• Assistant Camera – Arie Priede
• Equipment provided by Genesis Hire and Grey Moth
• Filmed at the Amadeus, May 2023