Second Monday Music: Two reviews of Baroque performance

The Seicento Baroque Ensemble of Boulder, Colorado

By Chuck Smythe

The first Seicento Baroque Ensemble concert of the new, 2014-2015 concert season was titled “Dies Irae” (days of wrath). It was held on Halloween weekend, and featured some appropriate seasonal music: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d (you know, the one in all the movies!), and the Witches’ scenes from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” Act II, Scene 1. There were also motets by Cannicciari, Bertulosi, Byrd, and Kuhnau.

    The big act, though, was the first performance outside of Europe of the “Dies Irae” of Michel Richard Delalande (1657-1726). Delalande was the court composer for the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the most influential composer of the era after Lully. “Dies Irae” was known only from a few unperformable manuscripts, the property of a reclusive Frenchman who wouldn’t let anyone study them. Finally Lionel Sawkins got permission to make copies and edit them into something that could actually be performed. He is now charging a hefty rental for them, and we were this first in this hemisphere to pay it...It was paired with Delalande’s better known “De profundis clamavi.”
    It was all very interesting and beautiful music, yet another proof to me that the Baroque was inhabited by many wonderful composers who have fallen into obscurity. As is usual for this most unusual ensemble, we performed this in Latin as it was sung by the French of the era, full of strange nasal vowels. Yes, scholars have actually learned this. The authorities were French conductors teaching foreigners how to pronounce Latin correctly, and non-French conductors complaining at length about that nasty accent.

Seicento gave its first Christmas concert this season. It was also our first performance with modern instruments tuned to modern pitch, our first with a guest conductor, and the first to be formally recorded.

    We collaborated with the Boulder Chamber Orchestra and its director and proprietor Bahman Saless. He’s quite an interesting fellow: he has managed careers as a conductor and composer, as a physicist, and as an entrepreneur. All in parallel, somehow. The soloists were Marjorie Bunday, one of Seicento’s regular soloists, and Szilvia Schranz, a lovely young woman I’ve known for many years, whose father is the second violinist with the Takács Quartet.
    The orchestra began with Handel’s Concerto Grosso in c, Op. 6 No. 8, followed by Richard Toensing’s “When Beings of Fire Sang Praises with Beings of Clay.” Toensing was a professor of composition at the University of Colorado for many decades, and died last summer. Saless had commissioned this work, one of his last. It is for viola solo (by Erika Eckert, the senior professor of viola at the music school). It is based on an Orthodox tonal mode, and the Russian Chant “Glory to God.”
    The second half of the concert was devoted to the “Vivaldi Gloria.” I’d never performed the piece before; a quick poll at the start of rehearsals discovered I was only one of four in the chorus who hadn’t. Evidently it’s popular with singers, and for good reason. The harmonies are fairly advanced for Vivaldi’s era, and the work is quite lively and showy. Also, it’s relatively easy!
    Both of two performances went off quite well. Rather than write any more about them, I offer a video recording of the first movement. The audience was a bit small – this was our “away” concert, at Montview Presbyterian in Denver (on December 20), where we’re still working to build an audience. The Boulder concert was standing room-only.

Copyright © 2015 by Chuck Smythe