Albany Consort Live-Streamed from St. Ignatius

Last night the Albany Consort live-streamed a more limited version of its Roaring ¹⁷20s program than was originally intended, due to working with reduced resources. In place of an “All Star Band,” the performance was given by a quartet led by Jonathan Salzedo at the harpsichord. He was joined by his wife Marion Rubinstein on recorder (and keyboard in the final selection), his daughter Laura Jeannin on violin, and Roy Wheldon on gamba. The program itself could still have been consistent with the original intention of presenting selections that may well have been performed by the Collegium Musicum that met regularly at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig.

This could easily have been the case for the final selection, the first movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1052 harpsichord concerto in D minor, even if Salzedo had to revise the score for reduced resources. Bach was also represented on the program by his BWV 1016 sonata for violin and harpsichord in E major. The quartet began the program with a “programmatic” trio sonata (TWV 42:C1) taken from Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Der getreue Music-Meister. Following the overture, the “program” depicted five women from Ancient Greek and Roman culture: Xantippe, Lucretia, Corinna, Clelia, and Dido. The two Bach selections were separated by a concerto by Jean-Philippe Rameau, the fifth in his collection Concerts de Pièces de Clavecin Avec un Violin et une Viole.

All of these selections were given engaging performances. The venue was St. Ignatius Parish, presented through is 24/7 YouTube Livestream. This is a church of gargantuan proportions with an enormous dome capable of sucking up sounds from anywhere in the sanctuary. Fortunately, the performance took place on the altar, a safe distance from that dome; and skillful microphone placement presented a well-balanced account of all four performers. In addition, multiple cameras were engaged, providing well-selected points-of-view that could almost be taken as an alternative for score-following.

As of this writing, the recorded video has not yet been upload to the Web page of videos on the Albany Consort Web site. However, there will be an “encore” live-stream tomorrow, Saturday, at 7 p.m. Further details about this performance may be found on an Albany Consort Web page of upcoming events.