Tag: historically informed

Musica Lyrica in the 17th and 18th centuries

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Musica Lyrica

A concert embracing visiting Auckland cellist/gambist Polly Sussex, of music the 17th and 18th centuries. By Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Johan Jakob Froberger, Joseph-Hector Fiocco, Handel, Buxtehude and Anon. 

Rowena Simpson (soprano), Shelley Wilkinson (baroque violin), Emma Goodbehere (baroque cello), Douglas Mews (harpsichord) and Polly Sussex (cello, piccolo cello and viola da gamba)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Wednesday 21 April 6.30pm

Perhaps this concert was presented by the New Zealand School of Music because Polly Sussex was in town; she had played in the weekend with the baroque/classical ensemble Musica Lyrica at St Paul’s Lutheran church in Mount Cook. Sussex teaches at Auckland University and has an international reputation as a specialist in the early cello and viola da gamba. The ensemble, formed with the support of the church to perform Bach cantatas in their original Lutheran setting, comprises a total of about 15 musicians, varying according to requirements. 

In its advertising the concert was characterized by a Latin proverb Musica laetitiae comes medicina dolorum (music is a companion to joy and a balm of sorrow). No one can quarrel with any attempt to keep a vestige of Latin alive now that it has been almost entirely banished from the New Zealand school system (I heard that only 25 candidates sat Latin for NCEA Level One, alias School Certificate, last year).

The Hunter Council Chamber – the former main library that was socially central to students of my era, laid out with book-lined alcoves and shelves rising to the ceiling on all walls, reached by two levels of narrow iron gangways – may now be visually bereft, but it offers excellent acoustics for small instrumental ensembles though not so good for an orchestra.

The players presented a pretty sight. In addition to the delicately adorned harpsichord, a viola da gamba with a body of contrasting laminations and a cello, lay on the floor. While a piccolo cello and a normal cello were in thee hands of Polly Sussex and Emma Goodbehere, the two string players for the first piece, by Barrière. Barrière lived in Paris in the 18th century in the early years of Louis XV and became a virtuoso cellist.

The two cellos created a sound blend that I had never heard before, flowing harmonies that combined their voices in an utterly enchanting way. I was surprised by the sound of the piccolo cello, distinctly more open and sweet than many violas, and less nasal than the typical cello played high up the finger-board.

The Sonata II a tre, for piccolo cello, cello and harpsichord, comprised four short movements, some treating the two in canon, some as a normal duet. There was nothing complex or musically rich, but much that was technically tricky and quite charming.

Johan Jacob Froberger lived a century earlier, in Germany, Italy and England, and his influence was widespread, through Bach and Handel even perhaps to Mozart and Beethoven. It was a harpsichord Tombeau – a memorial honouring a dead person, in this case one M Blancrocher – that Douglas Mews played next. It offered an admirably warm and clear display of the sonorous possibilities and playing techniques of the harpsichord, in interesting harmonies: very slow and quite elaborate in conception.

Mews also played the famous last movement of Handel’s ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ keyboard Suite in E.

Jean-Hector Fiocco was Belgian, a contemporary of Barrière. Soprano Rowena Simpson had the company of the two cellists and Mews in his Lamentatio prima which, according to the programme note, is a setting of Chapter 2 of the Book of Jeremiah. Rowena returned three years ago from years of study and singing in Holland and elsewhere in Europe and her voice projected confidently, reflecting that experience not simply in early music but also in dramatic interpretation; sustaining her breath over quite elaborate passages and handling decorations, including a cadenza near the end, with ease.

She also sang the next piece – a German aria of the 1720s by Handel: ‘In den angenehmen Büschen’. It was distinctly more modern sounding, though light in spirit and unlike his typical operatic writing of that time. The accompaniment of baroque violin (Shelley Wilkinson) and harpsichord however connected it clearly enough with an earlier era.

Then came a surprise: an anonymous viola da gamba sonata recently discovered in the Bodleian Library. Polly Sussex explained what was known of its provenance: found in 2006 in a collection, bearing the hallmarks of a French viol piece of the late 17th century, though described on the modern printed score as of Lübeck. It was pretty, exercised the player’s technique and the resources of the instrument, a normal seven-string bass viol of the time.

Finally Rowena Simpson returned, accompanied by Wilkinson, Sussex and Mews to sing Buxtehude’s cantata ‘Singet dem Herrn’, one of the few vocal works of this mainly organ composer. It exercised the musicians while proving most engaging, with undulating dynamics and attractive passages of tremolo or trilling.

It’s encouraging that such small, specialist ensembles keep arising around Wellington, evidencing the abundance of musical talent ready to take initiatives to attract audiences of both aficionados and newcomers to the genre in question. This ensemble has talent to spare.

Second concert by Freiburg Baroque Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Freiburg Baroque Orchestra conducted by René Jacobs with Gottfried von der Goltz (violin) – second concert

Symphony No 92 in G (‘Oxford’ – Haydn), Violin Concerto No 5 in A, K 219 (‘Turkish’ – Mozart), Symphony No 41 in C, K 551 (‘Jupiter’ – Mozart)

Wellington Town Hall

Thursday 18 March 2010

These two concerts brought what is widely regarded and one of the half dozen finest period instrument orchestras to us.  It’s just as well such a band comes to play the great music of the late 18th century, as the big symphony orchestras don’t play it much anymore, having become embarrassed about it over the past 30 years for fear of criticism from the early music purists: Haydn, Mozart, even early Beethoven.

The orchestra comprises excellent musicians who, even without the discipline of a conductor, produces performances that are arresting and idiomatic, flexible and in perfect accord. That was the effect of hearing Mozart’s ‘Turkish’ violin concerto in which the soloist, von der Goltz, the orchestra’s concertmaster, made the running in its interpretation, in its rhythms and tempo:  was it fair to wonder whether Jacobs’s influence was tempered here, without the somewhat curious speeds and sudden rallentandi that characterised the two symphonies, particularly the Jupiter?

The concerto is an extraordinary piece for a 19-year-old. The rising arpeggios of its opening phase had all the speed needed, coloured by restrained vibrato; he was not shy of giving different shapes to the ornaments, of putting the stress, unusually, on the second beat, of taking his opportunities to elaborate phrases with little cadenza-like flourishes. All this was arguably in keeping with knowledge of 18th century practice, though I felt that the main first movement cadenza had echoes of the 19th century. The second movement found the soloist in a state of exquisite calm, playing with an intimacy of tone peculiar to the baroque violin. It lent a startling contrast to the last movement where the Turkish elements, popular in Vienna at this time, burst upon it and where an authentic sounding vigour emerged.

The two symphonies were presented in a way that inhabited a sound world that was rather more different from we are used to with conventional orchestras. Here, with Jacobs himself fully in charge, there was much to admire, in the warm sounds of the flute and the two wooden oboes, the natural horns and trumpets, enhanced by the clarity of the Town Hall; the hard timpani were distinctive, but after a while their sound seemed to become slightly dislocated from the ensemble of the rest of the orchestra.

I hardly recognized the slow movement of the Oxford Symphony though it was one of the pieces that I played, as cellist, in a predecessor of the Wellington Youth Orchestra a long time ago. And there were speeds that were, shall we say, surprising, even though one has heard this music played rather like this on record often enough. I was open to persuasion, and enjoyed the performance though I will also continue to enjoy full-blooded performances (if any) by conventional symphony orchestras.

Jacobs’ field extends from Monteverdi through Bach and Gluck and as far north as Mozart, and really, no further: for him perhaps, Mozart is cutting-edge contemporary. Much of the performance of the Jupiter symphony was simply alive and filled with energy; though we are very familiar with ‘historically informed’ performances, it was still stimulating to hear live, such a performance of a masterpiece that sits very much in the modern symphonic tradition. So it sometimes called for open ears and mind. The minuet was very fast. But in the Finale, I was troubled by what I felt as excessive ritardandi, followed by a sudden resumption of the earlier tempo. Do it once, but four time in exactly the same way and it becomes a cliché.

Much as this performance was revelatory, suggesting the sort of sound that Mozart might have known, I have in my mind performances by modern orchestras that manage to prolong and intensify the drama of this great finale, affording its marvellous contrapuntal and fugal structure a grandeur and power that may be a little inauthentic but which works more on the emotions than does the lighter fabric of a classical (rather than baroque, one might add) orchestra.