2020/VIRTUAL Salon to End Year with Purcell

John Closterman’s 1695 portrait of Henry Purcell (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Following up on last night’s video-stream of “Messiah: Shaken, not stirred,” the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) & Chorale will conclude its 2020/VIRTUAL Salon Series with a program entitled PURCELL: Something Old, Something New. The program will survey three different genres of instrumental music composed by Henry Purcell. The performers will be violinists Katherine Kyme and Noah Strick and violists Maria Caswell and Aaron Westman with continuo provided by William Skeen on gamba and Katherine Heater on harpsichord. The offering will be a “concert video,” recorded in Herbst Theatre this past November 6 in accordance with the Order of the Health Officer of the City and County of San Francisco. (Readers may recall that all ten of the video recordings made for SF Music Day 2020 this past October were made in Herbst under that same accordance.)

The PBO program will begin with the ninth fantasia that Purcell composed for string ensemble, Z. 742. (For those unfamiliar with the Purcell catalog, it was compiled by Franklin B. Zimmerman, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1968 and is now an Emeritus Professor.) The program will then continue with two trio sonatas, Z. 799 in A major and Z. 807 in G minor. (The program notes prepared by PBO Scholar-in-Residence Bruce Lamott explain why Purcell’s trio sonatas require four players.) The final selection will consist of instrumental movements from Purcell’s Z. 629 “semi-opera” The Fairy-Queen with an anonymous libretto based on William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This video will be streamed this coming Tuesday, December 22, at 8 p.m. As was the case for last night’s offering, all necessary information can be found on the Web page for the Series. This includes a hyperlink to a YouTube Web page and the “coming soon” promise of a similar link to Facebook. There are also four useful pull-down menus. These include one for the content of the entire program, one for Lamott’s program notes, one for a glossary (which may be consulted while reading Lamott’s notes), and one identifying the instruments played by the six performers.