Albany Consort Announces Two Streamed Programs

The Albany Consort has announced the opening of its 2020–21 season with two streamed concerts. Both of them will be live-streamed in December and January, respectively, after which they will be archived as recordings for subsequent viewing. The necessary hyperlinks will be posted on the ensemble’s home page a couple of days prior to each performance. These will be free concerts, and tickets will not be required. However, attendees (and other interested parties) are encouraged to visit the group’s donation Web page.

The first offering will be a solo harpsichord recital by Jonathan Salzedo entitled brought to you by the letter f. The program will survey four composers, each from a different country, whose names all begin with an F. England will be represented by the song settings of Giles Fanaby. The Italian will be Farnaby’s contemporary, Girolamo Frescobaldi. The German will be Johann Jakob Froberger, who forbade publication of his manuscripts, meaning that only his noble patrons and friends knew what he had composed. Finally, there will be harpsichord transcriptions of gamba music composed by either Antoine Forqueray or his son Jean-Baptiste. This performance will take place at 7 p.m. on Saturday, December 19.

courtesy of Jonathan Salzedo

The title of the second concert will be The Roaring ¹⁷20s, performed by the Albany Consort’s All Star Band. The selections may well have been performed by the Collegium Musicum that met regularly at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig. Bach became the director of this group in 1729, and he will be represented by both the BWV 1041 violin concerto in A minor and the BWV 1052 harpsichord concerto in D minor. Appropriate to the season the ensemble will also play the fourth violin concerto in Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 8, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (the contest between harmony and Invention). That fourth concerto, in the key of F minor, is best known as the “Winter” concerto from The Four Seasons. The remaining composer on the program will be Georg Philipp Telemann with his descriptive suite based on episodes from Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. This performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 28, with an “encore” on Saturday, January 30, at 7 p.m.

The video recordings of both concerts will subsequently be archived on the Web page of videos on the Albany Consort Web site.