“ 'Emotion recollected in tranquillity'. What, in the tranquillity of January, do I take away from our performance of Jommelli's Requiem in November last year? The answer may surprise you.

“ Jommelli's music takes us more than most to the interface between artifice and expression. This is an old chesnut. If you have time, read Charles Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (1752) for an early attempt to disentangle technique from effect. Charles Burney was clear in his mind that what mattered was technique, polished and refined in such a way that craft itself elevated the human spirit. Jommelli was a product of the Neapolitan School of musical training. In the Naples conservatories of the 17th and 18th centuries, students were taught technique even if they had nothing to say. The Neapolitan style was technical cliché built upon technical cliché. The question is, when does technique suddenly traverse a line and become meaningful, expressive art? The impossibility of defining 'when' should perhaps encourage us to find a better question. What about, Can craft of itself move us? The answer is of course, yes. And perhaps more than we imagine, unless you're someone who is bowled over by incompetence.

“ So, Jommelli is a great craftsman in the Neapolitan mould. Avison and Burney would recognise his sort. He writes in a manner that makes excellent musical sense. His ideas are of themselves not particularly striking, but they are beautifully managed. He teaches us to admire competence and skill, to be satisfied, indeed elevated, by his artful manner. We need to bring this notion to our listening more often than perhaps we do. It's OK to cry with pleasure when we hear a canon, or a theme in augmentation. And it's OK to love Jommelli because he is a first rate musical technician. At which point, he can emerge as much more than the sum of his technical parts.”