Thursday, October 27, 2016

Juilliard415 Performs Vivaldi and Albinoni

On Tuesday, I went to Holy Trinity Church on Central Park West to hear the first of the four recitals the Juilliard415, the school's Baroque chamber ensemble, will give this season.  All the works performed were written by Venetian composers of the seventeenth century.

The program began with a work by the most famous of all Italian Baroque masters, Antonio Vivaldi.  The piece was a seven movement chamber concerto in G minor, RV 104, entitled La Notte and published in 1728 in Amsterdam as one of the six flute concertos comprising the Op. 10.  Considering the enormous popularity of The Four Seasons, it's hard to believe today that Vivaldi's music was almost forgotten during the Classical and Romantic eras and really only rediscovered and given the appreciation due it in the twentieth century.  In his position at the Ospedale della Pietà, Vivaldi had a readymade orchestra at hand and composed prolifically for them.  Though he died in relative obscurity in Vienna in 1741, he left behind a staggering number of works, including more than 40 operas.  As for the present piece, its mood reflects the decadence of the Venetian Republic in its final years.  It was a city given over to pleasure and vice, one whose seductive iniquities both Da Ponte and Casanova were later to describe so luridly in their respective memoirs.  There is a distinct sense of menace in this work, and the listener feels all about him the dangers lurking in the darkened streets frequented by masked revelers.   

Following the Vivaldi were a series of works by lesser known composers - a Sonata Decimasesta, a Sonata Qunita a due, and a Sonata Decimaquarta by Dario Castello of whose life almost nothing is known; a Sonata in D minor, Op. 10, No. 18, by Giovanni Legrenzi, an opera composer as well as maestro di cappella at St. Mark's Basilica; a Trio Sonata in D minor by Alessandro Stradella who led a notorious lifestyle and eventually died at the hands of an assassin in Genoa in 1682 after having survived an earlier attempt on his life in Turin in 1677; and a Canzon quarta à 4 by Girolamo Fescobaldi, a master of counterpoint whose keyboard compositions influenced both Bach and Purcell.

The final work on the program was the Trio Sonata No. 1 in D minor by Tomaso Albinoni.  During his lifetime, Albinoni achieved his greatest fame as an operatic composer.  By his own count, he wrote 81 operas.  They were a great success throughout Italy, and the composer was even invited to Munich to direct two of them.  The scores of most of these operas, however, were not published during Albinoni's lifetime and were subsequently lost so that it is primarily for his instrumental pieces that he is remembered today.  Ironically, his greatest claim to fame rests on a piece with which he may have had no actual connection.   That's the famous Adagio in G minor, invariably included in any recorded miscellany of Baroque music.  Whether there actually existed a fragment authored by Albinoni on which the work was based, or whether the entire composition was the invention of musicologist Remo Giazotto is still open to debate.  Nevertheless, it remains one of the few "Baroque" compositions recognizable to the general listener.

Tuesday's recital lasted approximately 75 minutes and, despite the unfamiliarity of most of the pieces performed, was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  This series offers New Yorkers their best opportunity to hear Baroque works played on the period instruments for which they were written.  In addition, the members of the ensemble are not only superb musicians but also possess an unparalleled scholarly knowledge of the music they are offering to their audience.

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