ABS Brings Vivaldi to Summer Festival

Engraved portrait of Antonio Vivaldi by François Morellon la Cave (public domain, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church the American Bach Festival (ABS) presented the first of the two performances in its annual Summer Festival. The title of the program was Viva Vivaldi; and, for the most part, it reproduced a performance of the four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi known collectively as The Four Seasons, which had been performed about a year ago in the Green Room in the War Memorial Veterans Building. Each concerto featured a solo performance by a different ABS violinist as follows:

1. Spring: Tomà Iliev
2. Summer: Tatiana Chulochnikova
3. Autumn: Jacob Ashworth
4. Winter: YuEun Kim

The intermission took place between “Summer” and “Autumn.” The first half of the program began with the RV 549 concerto for four violins in D major, the first concerto in the Opus 3 (L’estro armonico) collection. The violinists were then given a bit of a rest after the intermission with the selection preceding the “Autumn” concerto. The first of these featured cellist. Gretchen Claassen playing Vivaldi’s RV 43 sonata in A minor. This was followed by a trio sonata for two violas (Ramón Negrón-Pérez and Yvonne Smith) and basso continuo (Steven Lehning) transcribed from the eleventh sonata in the Opus 1 collection.

Many readers probably know that I have reported on performances in St. Mark’s for quite some time. Ensembles of all sizes have benefited from its affordances. They include a generous amount of space for a reasonably large audience. Nevertheless, there was an intimacy in last night’s performances which tended to get “lost in space.” To some extent, Ashworth and Kim seemed to maintain a stronger sense of contact with the listeners than Iliev and Chulochnikova did; but that could just as easily been an element of activity, rather than musicianship! (Ashworth was particularly engaging in his capacity for “playing with” the music, rather than just performing it, while Kim was jaw-droppingly fearless in taking on the extremely vigorous passages.)

Mind you, more audience means more tickets; and more tickets means more revenue. That is clearly a major factor where an organization like ABS is concerned. I just wish there were some way in which they could bring this music to smaller venues whose scale matched the intimacy of the music being played.