VoM Ends Season with Virtuoso Violins

Last night, after having to cancel the second concert in its three-concert season, Voices of Music (VoM) gave its final San Francisco performance of the season in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. The full title of the program was The Art of the Violin: Music of Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli & Geminiani. There was a bit of irony in that title, since a contemporary of those four composers, Pietro Locatelli, had published his own collection of twelve violin concertos under the title L’arte del violino; and Vivaldi was one of his major influences.

In fact, of the six selections on the program, four were composed by Antonio Vivaldi. Two of them were taken from his twelve publications: RV 356, the sixth concerto, in the key of A minor, in the Opus 3 collection, and RV 277, the second concerto, in the key of E minor, in the Opus 11 collection, known as Il favorito (the favorite). The other two were based on manuscripts. RV 208 in D major was known as the “Grosso mogul” (Great Moghul), which included cadenzas which found their way into Johann Sebastian Bach’s solo organ version of this music, his BWV 594 in C major. The program then concluded with RV 564 in D major, a concerto with solo parts for two violins and two cellos.

Title page of Geminiani’s arrangements of Corelli’s Opus 5 sonatas (from IMSLP, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License)

George Frideric Handel was represented by his HWV 320, the second of the twelve concerti grossi in his Opus 6 publication. This particular concerto grosso incorporated solo parts for two violins and cello. The astute reader will notice that two composers have not yet been taken into account. That is because both of them contributed to the remaining work on the program. The concerto in F major for two violins and cello had its origin as the tenth, in the key of F major, of the twelve violin sonatas that Arcangelo Corelli published as his Opus 5. Francesco Geminiani then arranged all twelve of these sonatas as concerti grossi, and that was the version in which the F major concerto was performed.

Such an abundance of concertos involved an abundance of soloists. The featured violinists were Augusta McKay Lodge, Kati Kyme, YuEun Gemma Kim, and Chloe Kim. The participating cellists were William Skeen and Elisabeth Reed. As a result, the diversity of the selections also afforded the opportunity to appreciate different performance styles. Most important, however, was the consistently upbeat rhetoric of the music being performed. Those spirited accounts made the listening experience particularly refreshing, even when the concertos themselves may have been familiar to the listener.