Week 15/2026: Bizarrerie
Week of 6 April 2026
The start of the week was three days off work, thanks to public holidays and an extra day’s leave. It was very hard to go back to work on Thursday!
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
Bizarrerie
Van Diemen’s Band
On Saturday I went to the Ian Potter Recital Hall (at the Hedberg) to see Van Diemen’s Band’s new show Bizarrerie.
This is (I think) the fourth show of theirs I’ve seen since I first learned about them in 2022. (Read about 2024’s Songs of the Sea with Mikelangelo and 2025’s Sirens.)
The show was billed as spotlighting some rare and unusual instruments of the Baroque period, with the band observing that the era was
“full of innovation and experimentation, with composers striving to stir the emotions using all the tools at their disposal—including some instruments which eventually fell by the wayside of history”.
They said one of the pieces had been described in The Times as sounding “like Vivaldi gone bananas”.
Who wouldn’t want to hear that?
I was super excited for this show especially after having seen some of their posts leading up to the show including violist Karina Schmitz talking about the viola d’amore, which featured in one of the concertos. This instrument has two sets of strings. The top strings are played in the same way as other violins, and the bottom strings are not actually touched by the bow but resonate sympathetically to produce their sound.
There was also a video from Simon Martyn-Ellis talking about the guitar and the lute that he’d be playing.
I like to prepare for things like this so I spent the week leading up to the concert listening to some of VDB’s back catalogue, including Bohemia, which was released last year, and the Handel Concerti Grossi (Op. 3), as well as (kind of related) some wonderful viola da gamba pieces from the late virtuoso Petr Wagner.
I floated through the week.
The false start
I’ve been to the Ian Potter Recital Hall before and I sat in the back section and didn’t like it, so this time I was lucky enough (and early enough) to score a front row seat. Which was great until I got there and my seat . . . wasn’t there.
Now, I’ve heard of elevators in buildings not having a 13th floor and going from 12 to 14, but this row of seats stopped at 13, when there should have been a 14.
Ummm, what?
Okay, that got sorted. I sat on the opposite end of the front row, and the show started.
Exciting!
The concert
Here’s the program.
- Rameau: La Poule from Sixième Concert from Suite in G Major RCT 6
- Vivaldi: Concerto for Viola d’amore and Lute in D minor
- Fasch: Concerto for Gallichon
- Latham: Movement II from Piccolo Violin Concerto (World Première)
- Durante: Concerto in A Major ‘La Pazzia’
It was amazing, and the instruments are all so interesting it was hard to know where to look. I was especially interested in the cello, because (I assume) it’s like a modern cello but it doesn’t have the spike thing* to rest it on the ground, so the musician, Martin Penicka, holds it with his legs to play it. I wondered how heavy the instrument is and if that makes it harder to play than a modern cello. I’m guessing it would be similar to a viola da gamba but I don’t know how complicated it is to hold those either so it doesn’t really answer my question!
(* I googled this. It’s called an end pin, and it was first used in the 19th century (one source says 18th). Before that, all cellos would have been held the same way as this one. The end pin changed the way the instrument was played—and people have written theses on it, it’s that significant.)
Sorry, distracted . . .
Karina Schmitz said that Vivaldi was very fond of the viola d’amore and composed several concertos for it, including the one we heard. This is a little snippet of the rehearsal of the viola d’amore and lute concerto.
The piccolo violin was made by luthier Douglas Coghill here in Lutruwita, and VDB’s artistic director Julia Fredersdorff talked about it before playing the piece. The audience was like, “awww” when Julia held it up. It was the cutest violin ever. She said (I think) it’s about a quarter of the size of a regular violin—the size you’d give a six-year-old—and has 3/4 size fret board. (See what happens when I don’t take my notebook with me, I forget the little details . . . but seriously, who takes a notebook to a concert? Who cares, maybe I will in future. I hate forgetting details!)
It’s a replica of a 1613 Amati piccolo violin, which is in the National Music Museum in South Dakota.
The concerto was beautiful. Jabra Latham started composing it when he found out that VBD had commissioned the piccolo violin. He said that this instrument “is both intriguing for its pitch & technical idiosyncrasies, and the beauty and depth of its tone”. He noted that the piece “is possibly the first new music to be composed for the piccolo violin for a couple of hundred years – an amazing thought”.
That is very cool.
Here’s one of VDB’s videos of it.
The final concerto was completely nuts (this was the ‘Vivaldi gone bananas” piece), where Julia said they’d be playing instruments they didn’t know how to play. Sure . . . I mean, there’s a musician not knowing how to play a different instrument to what they usually play and then there’s Barb picking up a violin and not even knowing how to hold the bow, right?
Simon Martyn-Ellis, who had played the baroque guitar/lute and the gallichon in the earlier pieces, played a lute like instrument that Julia described as a cross between a lute and a giraffe (it’s called theorbo, and it might have been in the previous piece because it’s in the video …). And there were duelling violas/violins and a lot of strumming of instruments I don’t think they usually strum.
I think you needed to see that to believe it! It was a fun way to end the show, which as Julia, said, is something we probably all need at the moment.
If there is one word to describe how I felt at the end of the concert it would be ‘joyful’. It really was the most uplifting experience to see and hear these magificent musicians bring life to these pieces, many of them on instruments that are not well known—even the baroque violins, violas and cello are, as I learned a while ago, different to the modern equivalents.
I feel incredibly grateful to have been able to experience this.
I’m also grateful to have got one of the last copies of VDB’s Handel CD that I’d been listening to during the week because I LOVE this!
And I really hope they made a recording of this show at some point.
Wow!
What else did I do this week?
I went out on Monday, sat on the beach and watched some birds. I’m old. I’m a bird person now.
There were a lot of seagulls, some kelp gulls and a few crested terns.
One of the juvenile terns got in a bit of a turf war with the seagulls, which was entertaining.
Then it started screeching at the adults, presumably for food.
It didn’t get lucky.
After that, I took advantage of being further from home than I usually go, and explored the surroundings. What I ended up doing was a ‘stuck in the mud’ project, where you stay in exactly the same spot for a period of time and make a certain number of photos without moving, just to see how creative you can be when you’re limited in where you can go.
I lost count of how many photos I made in the 15 minutes I was there, and I don’t think any of them are fantastic, but it was a fun exercise.
The photos are on my photo blog.
Habit tracker
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 4/7
- Hip or shoulder sequence exercises (5 days): 3/5
- Walk (7 days): 6/7
- Thinking time (4 days): 2/4
- Morning planning routine (2 days): 0/2
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 3/7
- Work shutdown (2 days): 0/2
- 9.30 shutdown (6 days): 4/6
- Evening routine (7 days): 7/7
Summary of the week
This week I learned
How to put a QR code into a Word document.
I also learned that the viol (viola da gamba) family of instruments is not the same as the violin family, which is the violin, viola and cello (aka violincello ‘large violin’). Among other differences, viols have more strings, have frets and are played with an underhand grip. They come in several sizes and most of them are held by the musician’s legs. I found some pictures of smaller ones and they are still played upright but might rest on the player’s thighs rather than being held in between their legs. (They look very cute.)
I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole about baroque instruments this week . . .
This week I noticed
The signs on the Rivulet track telling bikes not to go onto the part of the track that comes off Gore Street have all been removed.
What’s making me think?
From Intelligent Change:
Learning feels productive. It gives you the dopamine of progress. But growth doesn’t come from collecting wisdom. It comes from living it. Both you and I know growth is not passive. It doesn’t happen because you followed five experts on Instagram. Or finished a Substack deep dive on identity.
Your mind is tired of keeping up with opinions that don’t belong to you. The real work is not collecting more input. It’s figuring out what actually resonates with you and letting go of the rest.
Reading
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- “The Mystery of Major Molineux” by Marcus Clarke
Listening
- Spacemakers podcast Season 4
- Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op. 3 (Van Diemen’s Band)
- Bohemia (Van Diemen’s Band)
- Gottfried Finger: The complete music for viola da gamba solo (Petr Wagner & Ensemble Tourbillon)
- Johann Abraham Schmierer: Zodiaci Musici (1698) (Ensemble Tourbillon & Petr Wagner)
- The World Is To Dig (They Might Be Giants)
Watching
- Resident Alien
- Bizarrerie by Van Diemen’s Band
- Doctor Who: ‘The Abominable Snowmen’
- Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair
- Deadloch Season 2
About The Author
