*University of Manchester Baroque Orchestra
Manchester University Baroque Orchestra was founded by the Music Department in 2006 to give undergraduate and postgraduate students the chance to experience period performance and playing styles – an opportunity available to only a very small number of music students in the UK. Orchestra members play on a complete set of reproduction Baroque instruments owned by the department, which are loaned to students while they are members of the ensemble. Playing on reproduction instruments has its challenges: both string and wind players (but particularly wind players) have to learn techniques of playing that are sometimes quite new to them, as well as coping with the rather temperamental nature of the instruments, which are much more prone to problems of tuning and intonation than their modern equivalents. Of course we help with coaching from experienced professional players. What the instruments give you in return for your dedication and perseverance is an unrivalled opportunity to play the music of Baroque composers on the instruments for which the music was actually written. We give concerts at least once per semester, within the Martin Harris Centre and in external engagements, both as an independent ensemble and in collaboration with other ensembles such as the university chamber choir, Ad Solem. Highlights have included our performance at the installation of the university’s new Chancellor in 2008, the world première of the reconstructed version of Henry Purcell’s Come ye Sons of Arts, a revival of a concert programme from one of the original eighteenth-century Concerts of Antient Music, and a concert from the Venetian Baroque including the original version of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. In 2011–12 we are joining forces with the choir of Manchester Cathedral to mount a period performance of Handel’s Messiah in the atmospheric surroundings of the cathedral. Our programmes typically combine period interpretation of familiar Baroque classics with gems of the Baroque repertory that are less well-known today.
See contact