Yesterday, the Julliard415 gave its final noontime performance of the season at Holy Trinity Church. In honor of the occasion, the period instrument ensemble gave a full 1 1/2 hour recital that featured works by several of the most important composers of the Baroque and Classical periods - Biber, Buxtehude, Fasch, J.S. Bach, Zelenka, Haydn and Mozart.
The program opened with Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's Harmonia Artificiosa-Ariosa No. 3 in A major (1696) for two violins, cello, lute and harpsichord. Biber, who was himself one of the great violin virtuosi of the seventeenth century, introduced a number of innovations in composing music for that instrument. His passacaglia in the Mystery Sonatas, for example, was one of the first pieces ever written for solo violin. In the present work, he made use of the technique of scordatura in which the music is written as though for a normally tuned violin even while the instrument's actual pitch has been tuned differently. Adding to the difficulty such a situation obviously presents to the performer is that in this case the work was also a canon in which the two violins were separated by an interval of four bars. Considering the difficulties they faced, the two violinists at this performance - Nayeon Kim and Toma Iliev - were amazingly proficient and handled the complexity of their parts with total poise.
Next was Dieterich Buxtehude's Trio Sonata No. 3 for violin and viola da gamba in A minor, BuxWV 254, Opera prima (c. 1694) followed by Johann Friedrich Fasch's Sonata for Violin, Oboe, Bassoon and Continuo, FaWV N:F4 (n.d.). After these two pieces came Bach's Sonata sopr'il Soggetto Reale from Musicalisches Opfer BWV 1079 (1747). The Musical Offering, according to legend, was written in response to a challenge given Bach by Frederick the Great to write a six-voice fugue on a theme chosen by the king. Bach did succeed in improvising a three-voice fugue (his performance before the king was one of the few occasions on which he was known to have played the pianoforte) and upon his return home fulfilled the king's request through his completion of the Ricercar a 6 that is central to the entire work. In this particular trio sonata, the third of the work's five sections, the king's theme does not appear until midway through the second movement.
The Bach was followed by an improvisation that had been coached by faculty member Noam Sivan and that featured Melanie Williams on flute and James Kennerley on harpsichord. The point of an improvisation is to display not only the ability of the musicians on their respective instruments but their inventiveness as well. I had previously heard improvisations coached by Noam Sivan at Juilliard's past two Chamberfests and had been greatly impressed by what the musicians had succeeded in accomplishing on those occasions. Here the improvisation was in four movements of which the most interesting to me was the second movement fugue described by harpsichordist Kennerley as follows:
"It [the fugue] aims to imitate the Italianate North German fugues that one finds in the work of Handel, Bach and others, most characteristically represented by the repeated notes in the opening theme and the lively chains of suspensions in the free voices."
Also of note was the slow third movement that allowed Melanie Williams the opportunity to display her mastery of the flute. She was definitely one of the most accomplished performers on that instrument I've heard in recent memory.
After the improvisation came Jan Dismas Zelenka's Trio Sonata No.3 for violin, oboe, fagot and Basso Continuo in B flat major (n.d.) and then Bach was again featured in a performance of the Allegro from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050 (1721). What was most noticeable about this music was the way in which the harpsichord, after having been used as little more than accompaniment to the flute and strings for the greater part of the movement, suddenly came into its own as a solo instrument toward the conclusion. James Kennerley was again the harpsichordist and handed in a bravura performance of the cadenza.
After these works, the attention shifted from the Baroque to the Classical as the movement Un poco Adagio Affettuoso from Haydn's String Quartet in D major, Op. 20, No. 4 (1772) was performed. Haydn is usually portrayed as a somewhat stuffy old man in a periwig (the appellation "Father of the String Quartet" only adds to this image of advanced age) who composed dry, carefully constructed classical pieces that served as models for both Mozart and Beethoven. But this is unfair. In a piece such as this, clearly indebted as it is to the influence of the Sturm und Drang movement then sweeping through Europe, he appears rather to be anticipating the Romantic tradition. Surely even Schubert never wrote a work so filled with ardent feeling as this movement. Near the end, the sotto voce repetition of the theme conveys a powerful emotional impact that, as the Program Notes point out, completely overwhelms the listener. As for the performance itself - featuring Edson Scheid and Anna Lester, violins; Marie Daniels, viola; and Sarah Stone, cello - I was lucky enough to have heard the Orion Quartet, consisting of four of the world's foremost Haydn specialists, perform several of that composer's works (including the Op. 20, No. 5) this past season and thought the present rendition fully worthy of comparison to those performed by the more experienced ensemble.
The program concluded with the opening movement Allegro vivace assai from Mozart's String Quartet No. 14 in G major, K.387 (1782) nicknamed the "Spring." This was the first of the composer's six "Haydn Quartets" dedicated to the master with whom he sometimes played quartets himself (with Mozart on viola and Haydn on violin). In it he paid homage to the man who more or less established the form of the string quartet as we now know it and at the same time displayed his own genius for innovation. The work was performed exceptionally well by Chloe Fedor and Toma Iliev, violins; Bryony Gibson-Cornish, viola; and Alexander Nicholls, cello.
Period instrument performances are often thought to be of solely academic interest and of appeal only to those with a scholarly interest in the history of Baroque music. That was hardly the case at this performance. Instead, it proved to be a highly enjoyable recital for anyone with the least appreciation of chamber music. All the players yesterday were top level musicians and astonishingly adept at their instruments. I felt fortunate to have heard them.
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