Juilliard415 at Holy Trinity: Clérambault, Bach and Hoffmeister

Juilliard415, the school's period instrument student ensemble, performed its final recital of the season at Holy Trinity Church yesterday afternoon.  The hour long program featured a wonderful selection of little known works by a variety of Baroque composers.

The first work consisted of excerpts from a 1716 choral piece entitled L'Isle de Delos, itself taken from the larger work Cantates françoises à I. et II. voix avec simphonie, Livre III by the prolific Parisian composer Louis-Nicolas Clérambault.  As organist and choirmaster of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Clérambault pioneered the development of the French cantata of which the four songs presented form an excellent example.  L'Isle de Delos, an idyllic evocation of the Aegean in classical antiquity, was scored for flute, violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord and was sung brilliantly by mezzo-soprano Johanna Bronk.  Before the commencement of the work, Juilliard's program director announced that the instrumentalists and Ms. Bronk will be forming a permanent ensemble that will be touring the European festivals this summer.

There were two works by J.S. Bach on the program.  The first was the Sonata in E minor, BWV 1023 (1714) scored for violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord.  As in Bach's other trio sonatas, the violin shares the melody with the harpsichordist's right hand while the left hand, together with the viola da gamba, provides the continuo.  The work is based on the sonata da camera, a form of composition developed in the seventeenth century in Italy.  As such, it consists of dance movements such as Allemande and Gigue.  There is some question as to the dating since only one copy, that in the Dresden Court Library, is known to exist.  

The second Bach piece was a double concerto, the Concerto in C minor for Oboe and Violin, BWV 1060R (1736).  This was a later work Bach composed during his Leipzig period while directing the Collegium Musicum, a program of secular music held weekly at Zimmermann's Coffee House.  Aside from the two soloists, the work was scored for two more violins, viola, cello, double bass and harpsichord.  The piece in its present form is actually a reconstruction taken from the Concerto for Two Harpsichords, BWV 1060 as musicologists now believe that all Bach's keyboard concertos were transcriptions by the composer of his own earlier concertos for violin, oboe or (as here) both, none of which now exist in their original form.  Though the violin and oboe are given equal weight as soloists, the sound of the oboe dominates throughout the work as that of the violin tends to merge with the sound of the other string instruments. 

In between the two Bach pieces, the Juilliard students performed the Double Bass Quartet No. 2 in D by Franz Anton Hoffmeister.  This is essentially a string quartet in which a double bass replaces one violin.  In  presenting this configuration, it is almost as though Hoffmeister were setting himself a musical puzzle in which he could solve the various problems presented by the substitution of one instrument for the other.  In so doing, he gave the double bass a prominent role in all four movements.  As for Hoffmeister himself, he was a very well known figure in Viennese musical circles but more for his role as publisher than composer.  During his long career, he published works by many of the leading composers of his day, including Haydn, Mozart (who dedicated to him his String Quartet in D, K. 499) and Beethoven (who once addressed Hoffmeister as "my most beloved brother").