George Frideric Handel telling King George I about the music he composed for the musicians to play on the River Thames alongside the Royal Barge (painting by Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Late yesterday afternoon American Bach Soloists (ABS) wrapped up its Summer Bach Festival with three of the “usual suspects” composers that launched the Festival. In “order of appearance” those composers were Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann, and George Frideric Handel. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the first (HWV 348) of Handel’s three Water Music suites. This is the longest of the three suites, and it is distinguished by the amount of music composed for two natural horns. Those instruments were given a dynamite account by Sadie Glass (an alumna of the ABS Academy, which has not yet convened since the onset of the COVID pandemic) and Elisabeth Axtell. Jeffrey Thomas conducted the suite at a brisk pace, providing just the right celebratory rhetoric to conclude a thoroughly engaging season.
The intermission was preceded by another extended suite, Telemann’s TWV 55:G10 Burlesque de Quixotte. After a vigorous overture, the suite consists of seven movements, each bearing a title that reflects some aspect of the narrative of Miguel de Cervantes’ epic novel Don Quixote. Each of these is a spirited account, including the final movement entitled “Le couché de Quichotte,” which depicts the protagonist “at rest” with unexpectedly lively music. Telemann was also represented by his TWV51:c1 oboe concerto in C minor. The soloist was Stephen Hammer, who had also been a featured soloist during the first Festival program.
Thomas began the program with Bach’s BWV 1068, the third of the so-called “orchestral” suites, composed in the key of D major. This suite tends to be known for its instrumentation that includes three trumpets. However, Thomas chose to follow the scholarship of Joshua Rifkin, who suggested that the original version of the suite required only strings and continuo. Sadly, the resulting performance was more than noticeably scrappy, almost as if none of the string players were aware of each other. Perhaps the parts for those instruments were more challenging than I had thought, and it was hard to resist the prankish hypothesis that Bach had added the trumpets to drown out the strings.
The overall result was that this was a program during which things got better from one offering to the next, bringing the Festival to a glorious conclusion and seeding the first thoughts of what will be planned for the 2023 Winter Series.
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