One advantage of the summer is that I have to deal with fewer demands for my attention on Sundays. As a result, I am more likely have time for the weekly videos presented by Voices of Music as part of their Sunday Mornings at Ten series. Today’s offering was Episode 29 in the fourth season of these releases, each of which has its own YouTube Web page, which identifies the individual videos being selected. For this particular offering, there were nine such videos collected under the title Pool Party!
I must confess that the title left me scratching my head, but it certainly did not interfere with my impressions of both the nine individual selections of the video accounts for each of the performances. The entire program was framed by two concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. Hanneke van Proosdij launched the entire event with her sopranino recorder. She was soloist in Vivaldi’s RV 443 concerto in C major. The audio was taken from a performance at the Berkeley Early Music Festival in June of 2016, but the visuals were provided by Stephen Malinowski.
Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I have had a long-standing interest in Malinowski’s work. Sadly, I have not written about him since June of 2021, which happened to be when I completed my traversal of his animated visualizations of all of the preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. His techniques enabled even the tone-deaf listener to appreciate the technical intricacies of Bach’s polyphony. In this case they were just as effective in reflecting the ongoing give-and-take between ensemble and soloist. Mind you, I have my own ways of appreciating the virtuosities of such a give-and-take performance; but Malinowski’s approach to visualization definitely left me with a smile on my face! I only wished that more of the selections on today’s program had been given similar interpretations.
That said, I had no trouble appreciating the concluding Vivaldi offering, the RV 356 violin concerto in A minor (the sixth in the Opus 3 L’Estro Armonico collection of twelve). (The English title of that collection is best translated as “Furious Harmony!”) The soloist was Augusta McKay Lodge, and she definitely deserves credit for capturing the “furious” rhetoric without ever being overly aggressive. As always, the capture of both audio and video was supervised by David Tayler (whose performances all involved plucked string instruments); but it was interesting to see on the YouTube Web page for this particular selection that he was assisted by Lodge during the final stage of post production.
The two Vivaldi selections were complemented by two single-movement excerpts from compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach. The earlier selection on the program was the final (“Badinerie”) movement from the BWV 1067 (second) orchestra suite in B minor. The solo was taken by Dan Laurin on recorder, and the video included a frolicking porpoise and three stagnant bunnies. The penultimate offering, on the other hand, was the Sinfonia that serves as overture to the BWV 156 cantata Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe (I stand with one foot in the grave). For the most part, the video focused on the solo performance by Marc Schachman on baroque oboe.
Screen shot from the video excerpt from the performance of “Wu Song and the Tiger” with the instrumental ensemble to the right and the solo actor and dancer towards the center
The other contributing composers were Johann Pachelbel, George Frideric Handel (with the familiar Hornpipe movement from his Water Music suites), and Anthony Holborne. There was also a solo lute performance by Tayler of the Scottish tune “It is a wonder to see how the world does go.” Finally, there was a video of the tavern scene from Proosdij’s “Wu Song and the Tiger.” This was an “East meets West” semi-staged performance, which included a pipa played by guest artist Yihan Chen, as well as choreography by Carlos Fittante. I remember seeing this when it was first performed in March of last year, and I was delighted to be reminded of the experience.
Taken as a whole, this new episode emerged as a “more is better” experience, which skillfully made sure that “more” never devolved into “too much!”
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