This afternoon I went to a concert at Crown Court Church of Scotland, which I had never visited before. It tucked away in Russell Street, in Covent Garden, and the church itself is upstairs, with the hall on the ground floor. The church congregation dates back to the early eighteenth century - the first records are from 1711 - and was a home for the Scots who came to London, although there had been other congregations from the time of James I. They moved to the current site in 1719; by 1909 the building had become very dilapidated, so was rebuilt in its current form.
The church is rather plain, as one would expect; it is approached up a flight of stairs, and there would appear to be other offices or meeting rooms on the same floor. There is a very spacious hall downstairs, with more offices or meeting rooms - one thing I noticed was lists of names on one wall described as a "Cradle Roll". There seemed to be far too few names for the lists to be baptisms, but I can't think what else they might be.
The concert featured The Flautadors, who are one of the UK's leading recorder ensembles, although the instruments they were playing bore little resemblance to what one normally thinks of as recorders. They have a large repertoire, spanning over 800 years, and the music they were playing today was from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries - Richard Deering, Anthony Holborne, Matthew Locke, Georg Philip Telemann, Johan Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi. The programme included a wide variety of pieces, mostly fairly short.
No comments:
Post a Comment