A garden of early delights

Earthly Delights Early Music Festival | South Bank Centre, London

New Labour's rhetoric on the arts, soundly expressed at every turn by Chris Smith and endorsed by the People's Prime Minister, has it that popular and high culture are close and equally valued companions. Apoplectic practitioners of low- and high-brow art forms have agreed to differ with the cosy Islingtonian view of undivided culture, preferring partisan value judgements to bland political correctness.

New Labour's rhetoric on the arts, soundly expressed at every turn by Chris Smith and endorsed by the People's Prime Minister, has it that popular and high culture are close and equally valued companions. Apoplectic practitioners of low- and high-brow art forms have agreed to differ with the cosy Islingtonian view of undivided culture, preferring partisan value judgements to bland political correctness.

Although Smith and Blair were not in sight at the South Bank Centre's Early Music Weekend, the festival's programme offered echoes of their inclusive vision of the arts and ample historical support for lumping together the wantonly popular with the exclusively narrow, the lewd with the refined.

Earthly delights were at the heart of artistic director Philip Pickett's theme, allowing room for Bach's extraordinary contrapuntal complexities (including Andreas Staier's performance of the Goldberg Variations, passionate courtly cantatas from 18th-century France, and the tits-and-arse crudities of earlier Parisian chansons.

Dominique Visse and his Ensemble Clément Janequin, specialists in the demolition of barriers erected by musical snobs, sprinted from the Eurostar terminal to the Queen Elizabeth Hall, drew breath and unleashed a hugely satisfying programme of French smut. "The Pleasures of the Palace" presented a banquet of ribald chansons and rustic songs, served up in three meaty courses separated by ear-cleansing lute and guitar pieces and framed by apologetic prayers.

When I last heard this group at the Wigmore Hall in comparable Spanish and French repertoire, their programming suffered from inconsistent quality and a tendency to save the best for last. The latest offering was infinitely smarter in balance, textually engaging from beginning to end, and never short of fine music. Visse's distinctive, nasal countertenor could sear paint at 40 paces; certainly, it is not for the canary fancier. But it ideally crowns the sound of an ensemble that understands that blend need not be synonymous with bland, especially when delivering the onomatopoeia of Janequin's Le chant des oyseaulx or describing the tired, floor-scraping dugs mocked in Clemens non Papa's Du laid tétin.

Other delights in the festival proved more sublime than earthly, particularly so in two concerts of later French music. Catherine King, Charles Daniels and lutenist Jacob Heringman, one of the most sensitive accompanists in the business, explored the absurdly neglected 17th-century airs de cour repertoire, highlighting the often folk-like qualities of tunes by such favourites of Louis XIII as Moulinié, Guédron and the Boessets, father and son. Elaborate ornamentation and expressive graces were part of the performance tradition of these pieces, eloquently recreated by King in Jean-Baptiste Boesset's O dieux je ne scais pas and by Daniels, at ease in the upper reaches of his tenor voice, in Anthoine Boesset's N'espérez plus, mies yeux.

Harpsichordist Christoph Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques included airs de cour by Michel Lambert in their programme of courtly chamber music and cantatas, with Ombre de mon amant immediately confirming the star qualities of the lyric soprano Valérie Gabail, an immensely attractive recent convert from jazz and cabaret songs to the world of early music. Her account of Rameau's Orphée caught the cantata's dramatic episodes and changes of musical affect powerfully yet without undue histrionics. Gabail's beguiling inflection of words and ability to match appropriate shades of vocal colour to the text are sufficiently rare qualities, which suggest that her career will not be slow in its development.