Rameau Leaps In (Apologies to Pres) at ABS

The title of last night’s Summer Bach Festival presented by American Bach Soloists (ABS) was Barococo; and the heart of the program amounted to an encounter between Johann Sebastian Bach (High Baroque) and Jean-Philippe Rameau (Rococo). This was the only Rameau offering in the Festival, but it was definitely a generous one. It was a suite of seventeen instrumental selections from Rameau’s opera Dardanus, whose score included a rich serving of both dances and symphonies.

This turned out to be a rather lengthy undertaking; and I must confess that, somewhere around the halfway mark, I was beginning to feel as if Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas was serving up too much of a good thing. Nevertheless, I perked up for the “Air gay en rondeau” movement. This had become a personal favorite thanks to Lalo Schifrin, who turned it into a jazzy harpsichord solo for the “Versailles Promenade” track on his album The Dissection and Reconstruction of Music From the Past as Performed by the Inmates of Lalo Schifrin’s Demented Ensemble as a Tribute to the Memory of the Marquis de Sade.

By way of contrast, the Bach offering was significantly shorter in duration. This was BWV 234, the second of four Missae breves (short Masses), also known as the Kyrie–Gloria Masses, since the music sets the texts of only the first two selections of the Mass ordinary. BWV 234 was scored for SATB chorus with solo movements for soprano (Maya Kherani), alto (Sarah Coit), and bass (Mischa Bouvier). They were joined by tenor Matthew Hill to sing the choral movements as a vocal quartet.

Much of the music was appropriated (parodied) from earlier-composed cantatas. Those (like myself) without an encyclopedic memory of all of those cantatas can find the sources identified on the Wikipedia page for all four of the Kyrie–Gloria Masses. The performance itself was thoroughly engaging, and its brevity in the wake of Rameau was much appreciated.

Brevity was also served with two relatively short concertos by George Frideric Handel and Antonio Vivaldi, respectively. The Vivaldi selection was the A minor concerto for two violins, which was the eighth of the twelve concertos in the Opus 3 L’estro armonico (the harmonic inspiration) collection. This is one of several Vivaldi concertos that Bach transcribed for keyboard performance. However, violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and Tekla Cunningham gave a thoroughly engaging account of the music as Vivaldi originally conceived it.

The Handel concerto was HWV 314 in G major, the third of his concerto grosso compositions collected as his Opus 3. This particular concerto grosso featured a flute in the ensemble. That part was taken by Bethanne Walker, performing on a period-appropriate instrument. This required a delicate balance between the subtlety of the instrument and the accompanying string ensemble. In his conducting work Thomas found just the right “sweet spot” for the interplay of soloist and accompanying instruments.