VIRTUAL Salon Series to Resume with Handel

Last year this site tried to give a fair account of the 2020/VIRTUAL Salon Series, one of the streamed offerings of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) & Chorale. We are now well into the new year, and the series is about to continue. The announcement I received yesterday updated the overall title to PBO/VIRTUAL Salon Series, allowing more flexibility for how much longer the project will endure. As of this writing, the Web page for this series has announced two performances for next month, the first this coming Thursday and the second two weeks later.

The title of next week’s recital is HANDEL: Private Passions, with “private” referring to chamber music. Only six musicians will perform: violinists Carla Moore and Anthony Martin, violist Maria Caswell, cellist Paul Hale, bassist Kristin Zoernig, and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour. The program will be organized around three trio sonatas, beginning with HWV 391 in G minor, the sixth in Handel’s Opus 2 collection, composed in his early twenties during his visit to Rome to hone his skills in composing operas. The other two are from the seven Opus 5 compositions, the second in D major and the fourth in F major, the F major sonata appropriating music from the overture to the HWV 73 celebratory serenata Parnasso in Festa. (The celebration was the marriage of Anne, Princess Royal and Prince William of Orange.) These trio sonatas will be interleaved with two fugues from the 1735 publication Six Fugues or Voluntarys for the Organ or Harpsichord, arranged for the performers by PBO Music Director Richard Egarr.

This video will be streamed this coming Thursday, April 8, at 8 p.m. The entire program should last about one hour. The performances will be recorded from the Herbst Theatre stage. All necessary information can be found on the Web page for this concert. This includes a “coming soon” button, which will link to the video Web page in time for the performance. There are also three useful pull-down menus. These include one for the content of the entire program, one for program notes written by Scholar-in-Residence Bruce Lamott, and one for a glossary (also by Lamott, which may be consulted while reading his notes).