Avian Music in the ABS “Garden of Harmony”

Last night in Herbst Theatre the American Bach Soloists (ABS) concluded its Summer Festival with a program entitled The Garden of Harmony, which was also the title of the entire festival. That title had been assigned to the third concerto, in D minor, in Charles Avison’s 12 Concerti Grossi after Scarlatti, which was never given an opus number by the composer (regardless of what was printed on last night’s program sheet). Whether or not  Avison himself assigned the “Garden of Harmony” title is unknown, but it does not appear on the IMSLP Web page that lists Avison’s works.

I must confess that I have never been particularly enthusiastic about Avison’s treatment of the keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti, particularly when compared against the twentieth-century arrangements of seven of those Scarlatti sonatas that Vincenzo Tommasini prepared for Léonide Massine’s choreography of “The Good-Humoured Ladies,” made for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The Avison performance by violinists Tatiana Chulochnikova and Jacob Ashworth, with continuo by Gretchen Claassen on cello and Corey Jamason on harpsichord, lacked any sense of the light touch that keyboardists tend to bring to Scarlatti sonatas, which made the journey through the concerto’s four movements more than a bit of a slog. As the booklet program notes observed, arranging the music of others had become a significant cash cow in eighteenth century English, making for an early manifestation of capitalism that may have escaped Karl Marx’ notice. However, in today’s age of Historically Informed Performance, such efforts now run the gamut from innocuously quaint to downright tedious.

Taken as a whole, however, last night’s program was not so much occupied with Avison’s metaphorical garden is it was with the avian life inhabiting such a garden. When the music was not trying to imitate bird calls, soprano Nola Richardson was singing about them. Her voice was excellently suited to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century settings of texts by William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, along with a delightful account of “This merry pleasant spring,” an anonymous source taken from The Turpyn Book of Lute Songs published early in the seventeenth century.

For the most part, however, bird song was allocated to music for the violin. Elizabeth Blumenstock, YuEun Gemma Kim, Tekla Cunningham, and Rachell Ellen Wong all took turns in imitating birds (and occasional other natural sources) through their mastery of their respective instruments. In addition Jamason shifted from harpsichord to organ to perform George Frideric Handel’s HWV 295 organ concerto in F major, given the title “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.”

No animals were harmed in the making of this program, which, for the most part, was both engaging and stimulating.