Yesterday afternoon in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Festival portion of the tenth annual Festival & Academy presented by American Bach Soloists (ABS) got under way with a program entitled ’Tis Nature’s Voice. Those who know their early music probably recognize this as the opening line of the countertenor air that is the fourth movement of Henry Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia, setting a text by Nicholas Brady. Yesterday’s program, however, was all instrumental, allowing “nature’s voice” to “speak” through four eighteenth-century instrumental selections.
The most familiar of these filled the second half of the program. These were the first four of the twelve concertos in Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 8 collection, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (the contest between harmony and invention). Those four concertos are better known under the title The Four Seasons, depicting, in calendar order, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. This is meticulously conceived program music; and Vivaldi provided a thorough “program” for each concerto in the form of a sonnet. (English translations of the sonnets were included in the program book.)
This particular performance was distinguished by featuring a different violin soloist for each concerto. Leader and ABS Academy Faculty member Elizabeth Blumenstock performed the autumn concerto. The other three soloists were Academy alumni: Noah Strick (spring), Tatiana Chulochnikova (summer), and Rachell Ellen Wong (winter). Chulochnikova was also a recipient of the annual Jeffrey Thomas Award.
The result was that each concerto was endowed with its own distinctive personality. Indeed, none of the soloists played “by the book,” adding a rich diversity of improvised embellishments, imaginative approaches to tempo, diverse approaches to phrasing, and, in the case of the winter concerto, an improvised introduction to the middle movement. This was a distinctive approach to making music, rather than just “rendering” it from the “marks on paper.” In other words it was a “historically informed” set of four performances, all consistent with how music was played in the eighteenth century. Thus, while the thematic content was probably familiar to just about everyone in the audience, the music emerging from those performances could not have been more fresh and original.
The overall title of Opus 8 suggests that Vivaldi may have intended these concertos for pedagogical purposes, and we know little about if and how they were received by audiences. The two concertos by Georg Phillipp Telemann that began yesterday’s program were another matter. After moving to Hamburg in 1721, Telemann was basically accountable to “city government,” those who were (at least in name) “servants of the public.” Music was for the residents of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (to give the place its full official name), rather than any elite nobility of either state or church.
An eighteenth-century chalumeau, without its single reed (photograph by Sofi Sykfont, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)
Yesterday’s selections made it clear that Telemann knew how to go for “public appeal.” These were concertos written to evoke the sounds of frogs and crickets, respectively. For the record, they were not accompanied by explanatory sonnets. In each case Telemann singled out a few characteristic sounds and let listener imagination take care of the rest. The frog sounds were handled entirely by strings, featuring solo violin work by Academy alumnus Toma Iliev, whose solo chirps were quickly picked up by the rest of the string section.. The crickets, on the other hand, were represented by three winds, piccolo (Sandra Miller), oboe (Debra Nagy), and chalumeau (a single-reed predecessor of the clarinet played by Thomas Carroll). There were also extensive solo passages for a pair of bass players (faculty member Steven Lehning and alumnus Daniel Turkos), perhaps representing the rustling in the woods were the crickets were chirping.
The remaining selection before the intermission was Francesco Geminiani’s The Enchanted Forest, composed for a staged pantomime based on excerpts from the epic poem by Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered. The title refers to a spell cast over a forest by the Muslim sorcerer Ismen to prevent the Christian knights from felling the trees to build siege engines. However, there is little sense of this (or any other) narrative in Geminiani’s score. Rather, the music is a collection of short pieces, all suitable for dancing, grouped into two sections, eleven parts in the first and twelve in the second. Brevity of the parts is the key to the overall plan, and Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas led the ABS ensemble at a brisk clip. (Neither frogs nor crickets emerged from this forest.)
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