Younger Faces at Voices of Music Holiday Concert

Last night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church Voices of Music presented its annual Holiday Concert. As usual the program featured a performance of the eighth of the twelve concerti grossi in Arcangelo Corelli’s Opus 6 collection of twelve. Corelli’s score for this particular concerto includes the inscription “Fatto per la notte de Natale” (made for the night of Christmas); and it is popularly known as the “Christmas Concerto.” The program also included the “Autumn” and “Spring” concertos from Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the third and first of the four concertos that begin his Opus 8 collection Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (the contest between harmony and invention), as well as the B minor concerto for four violins and cello (the tenth) in the Opus 3 collection L’estro Armonico (harmonic inspiration). The other composers included on the program were Giuseppe Torelli and Georg Philipp Telemann.

The performance was also distinguished by a phenomenon that one of my former students liked call “lowering the average age” of the group. Cellist Adaiha Macadam-Sommer, who won the Voices of Music 2012 Bach Competition was making regular appearances with the group until her move to Portland, Oregon; but she returned for both solo and ensemble work last night. Dominic Favia, first seen playing trumpet for American Bach Soloists in April of 2016, was on hand for concertos by Torelli and Telemann. In addition, violinist Alana Youssefian, an alumna of the Historical Performance program at the Juilliard School, who performed with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra a little over a month ago, also divided her time between solo and ensemble performing. Finally, there were two entirely new faces in the violin section, Augusta McKay Lodge (another Juilliard alumna) and Amy Wang, both of whom also had solo opportunities in the Vivaldi four-violin concerto.

The evening also served as a landmark in the Voices of Music efforts to provide informative video documents of the group’s performances. With the video recording of the two Four Seasons concertos, the Voices of Music YouTube channel will soon have a complete documentation of performances of all of the concertos in that collection. As always, St. Mark’s was decked out with a generous number of cameras, all positioned to facilitate capture of the different “centers of activity” that arise over the course of these two concertos.

As to the performances themselves, there were any number of delightful opportunities to encounter new approaches to listen to music previously taken to be familiar. In several of the concerto performances, the ensemble shifted to pizzicato playing as one approach to shine a new light on a passage that had already been repeated several times. However, the most stunning moment for this writer was an encounter with the rich textures coming from the four solo violinists in the second (Larghetto) movement in Vivaldi’s B minor concerto:

The opening measures of the four solo violin parts in the Larghetto from Vivaldi’s B minor concerto (from the Appendix of the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, edited by Paul Waldersee, from IMSLP, public domain)

Finally, Youssefian provided the audience with a delightful “dessert course” as the soloist in a performance of Vittorio Monti’s “Csárdás.” Composed in 1904, this piece has become the staple offering of just about every gypsy orchestra. Clearly, this particular piece was not given a “historically informed performance.” Nevertheless, Hanneke van Proosdij’s recorder work provided just the right amount of spice to highlight Youssefian’s impressive virtuoso turns as soloist.