Late yesterday afternoon St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the opening Discovery Series program presented by American Bach. 2026–2027 will be its 38th season, and the Artistic Director continues to be Jeffrey Thomas. Ironically, the title of the first performance was Italian Panache; and no member of the Bach family was included on the program.
The Antonio Vivaldi monument at the Rooseveltplatz in Vienna (photograph by C.Stadler/Bwag, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international license, from Wikimedia Commons)
There were seven works on the program accounting for six composers. The only composer to be represented twice was Antonio Vivaldi. This seemed appropriate since Vivaldi was a significant influence on Johann Sebastian Bach, who rearranged a generous number of Vivaldi concerti for both keyboard and other instruments. In that vein, only one of those concertos was included on the program, RV 531, composed in G minor with solos for two cellos. The other Vivaldi selection was a vocal setting of Psalm 112 with soprano Mary Wilson as the vocalist.
All of the other composers on the program were from Vivaldi’s period. In “order of appearance,” they were Domenico Scarlatti (Sinfonia in C major), Tomaso Albinoni (Sinfonia à 5 in C major), Antonio Caldera (Ciaccona in B-flat major), Alessandro Scarlatti (Sonata à Quattro in F major), and Arcangelo Corelli (Concerto Grosso in D major). The result was seven imaginative approaches to making music during the transition from the seventeenth to eighteenth century.
For this period I find that I have a soft spot for the cello. I was therefore delighted to encounter two cellists contributing to the program. One of them, Gretchen Claassen, I have encountered (and written about) pretty much since I began this writing gig. The other, Joseph Howe, was new to me but got me to sit up and take notice in his performance of the Alessandro Scarlatti sonata.
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