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Review: Sunday concerts bring BLEMF to a satisfying close

5/30/2017

 
Review: Sunday concerts bring BLEMF to a satisfying close
By Peter Jacobi H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com
 
Two interesting Sunday programs completed the extended weekend of Bloomington Early Music Festival concerts, leaving this listener, and undoubtedly many others, gladly ready to wait for more of the same in the future.

A violin-fortepiano duo twosome

Chronologically, the musical bill of fare moved forward, closer to our days, on Sunday afternoon when the Duo Park-Kim (violinist Jessica Park and fortepianist Ji-Young Kim) offered a sanctuary-filling BLEMF audience in St. Thomas Lutheran Church a program of music by Schubert and Mozart.

Schubert was the women’s first object of attention, as they played his Violin Sonata in A Minor and transcriptions for violin of two of the composer’s songs, “Die Gebusche” (“The Bushes”) and “Nacht und Traume” (“Night and Dreams”).

The sonata is in pure Schubert form, with the expected moods and tempos included. He can surprise a listener, however, if just by following descriptions of movement titles. Take the A Minor’s opening Allegro moderato. The music is very much Allegro but not so much Moderato. “Whatever,” as they say these days. The sonata contains highly attractive music, and the visiting duo treated it with loyalty to Schubertian and period style. As played on Sunday, one could imagine hearing both it and the quietly spellbinding songs being performed at one of the composer’s intimate Schubertiades, very much in tune with the times.

Mozart’s A Major Violin Sonata, K.526, should be retitled Violin and Piano for the balanced attention the composer gives to both instruments. It is a joyous piece with a show-off closing Presto that the two musicians treated with proper and bravos-inducing ebullience.

And then, an orchestra

Under the direction and with the participation of two former BLEMF stars, violinist Ingrid Matthews and harpsichordist Byron Schenkman, the festival came to an auspicious end Sunday evening in Auer Hall, with a program of very different works by very different composers.

An orchestra of 21 members had been gathered to be used in shifting numbers to play music by composers well known and virtually unknown who worked in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The British Henry Purcell received early attention through the presentation of a suite of incidental music written for a 17th century theatrical production, “Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge.” The string of airs and rondeaus and hornpipes and such was delightfully performed by an ensemble of 14 strings and harpsichord Byron Schenkman at the keyboard, he a fellow with smiling countenance and flashy finger work all evening. And to follow that Purcell gem, there came another, his Chacony in G Minor.

There had to be Bach, of course, on a festive Early Music/Historical Performance closing program. The directors Schenkman and Matthews chose the Brandenburg Concerto Number 5 in D Major, having asked flutist Colin St. Martin, violinist Clara Scholtes, violist Reynaldo Patino, and cellist Kevin Flynn to join them for what became felicitous music-making. A harpsichord cadenza, as unleashed by Schenkman, was incredible, ferociously speedy and absolutely precise, but the whole of the performance was nothing less than rewarding.

The post-intermission selections included a Baroque big-timer, Georg Philipp Telemann, but also a couple of composers about whom and their music far less is known, 17th century Italian contemporaries Camilla de Rossi and Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco.

Telemann’s Concerto in G Major for Two Flutes, Bassoon, Strings, and Continuo gave flutists Colin St. Martin and Leela Breithaupt and bassoonist Kelsey Shilling ample chances to reveal their artistry once again in music of challenge and a most pleasant nature.

Camilla de Rossi’s Introduction and Sinfonia came from her oratorio “Il Sacrificio di Abramo,” one of four oratorios she left, all for solo voices and orchestra. What we heard required no voices, but her instrumental material, as niftily played on this closing concert, was attractive enough to make one want to hear more of the oratorio and other pieces she wrote. Distinguished lutenist Nigel North, violinists Matthews and Sarah Cranor, violist Jeffrey Smith, and cellist Christine Kyprianides (who in BLEMF’s pre-collapse years valiantly helped work to hold the festival together) collaborated in the distinctive reading of de Rossi’s music.

Sunday evening’s wind-up — given to the Veronese’s Dall’Abaco’s Concerto Grosso in D Major — brought an orchestral aggregate back to the stage, with, as soloists, violinist/director Matthews and Jessica Park (of the previously discussed Duo Park-Kim; hers was a busy day). Dall’Abaco’s Vivaldi-influenced concerto grosso packed a lyric punch and gave the ensemble, particularly the two soloists, a lovely vehicle in which to luxuriate.

Satisfying festival. The planners promise there’s more to come, but more about that later.

Weekend BLEMF Performers Deliver Splendid Shows

5/29/2017

 
By Peter Jacobi | H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com

The crowds have been large and enthusiastic for the Bloomington Early Music Festival series of concerts this past weekend. Here are some thoughts of mine about three events.

Friday evening

The echoing and spacious rotunda of the Monroe County Courthouse served as venue for a program of “French Love Songs in the Month of May.” These declarations of love were sung long ago, between the 13th century and the early 17th, coming from the creative spirits of Josquin des Prez to Marin Marais, just to list a couple of the more familiar composers.

What one heard and watched, thanks to the direction of a participant, Kathryn Summersett of the gleaming soprano, was a weave of compellingly attractive music, both vocal and instrumental. The concert required hardworking performers: four singers (Summersett, tenor Gregorio Taniguchi, countertenor Michael Walker and baritone David Rugger) and seven instrumentalists (violinist Maria Romero, lutenist Jon Wasserman, Charles Wines on percussion and recorder, Sarah Lodico and Brady Lanier on viols, Nicholas Burrus on harp and percussion, and Chris Burrus on viol, hurdy-gurdy, rebec and percussion).

The music, sad and joyful, both lulled and excited, coming at a listener as a river of sound, all of it falling sweetly on the ears as it swept one back in thought to those times so long ago. The singers were wonderful at their task, capturing what the music likely sounded like back then, as did the instrumentalists. The concert was a splendid example of historical performance at work, a worthy follow-through to the festival’s earlier programs.

Saturday afternoon

It was all Bach mid-Saturday in the filled sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church, four of Johann Sebastian’s sonatas requiring the virtuosities of Early Music performers well known hereabouts from previous BLEMF days and performances while they studied at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. All of them have by now further distinguished themselves as performers elsewhere as well as in Bloomington: violinist Ingrid Matthews, flutist Colin St. Martin, cellist Shelley Taylor and harpsichordist Byron Schenkman.

Each of the sonatas chosen bears the signs of Bach, brimming as they are with counterpoint and other juicy delectations. Thanks to the BLEMF planners; they found the right artists to display them. Matthews and Schenkman are most familiar to me, after numerous concert and CD exposures. The two of them partnered for Bach’s Sonata in G Major, BWV 1019, for Violin and Harpsichord. Each had plenty of opportunities to shine, while also blending into a needed ensemble.

I’m sorry that Schenkman didn’t have a solo spot, because he knows how to make the absolute most of the harpsichord. But Matthews did get her solo, choosing the G Minor, BWV 1001, with its fugal moments and lyrical, plus a final movement made for speedy and agile fiddling. My, how Ingrid Matthews fiddled!

Schenkman joined St. Martin for the Sonata in B Minor, BWV 1030, for Flute and Harpsichord, and they made it joyful listening. St. Martin produced notes at all times perfectly on point and clear and flourishes fluid, just as one prefers to have the instrument sweetly warble.

Finally, to the front came all four musicians, this time with cellist Shelley Taylor (providing basso continuo), to play the Trio-Sonata in G Major, BWV 1039. The quartet made of it a well-knit reading and an appropriate ending to a most appealing concert.

Saturday evening

This event had an added purpose: to honor Wendy Gillespie on her retirement from the Jacobs School, where she served for influential decades and in recent years took on the directorship of the Early Music Institute, for which — among numerous other achievements — she was instrumental in organizing the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project. She is considered a viol player supreme and has set high standards for those who play the instrument. One former student present for the concert, Liam Byrne, recalled that after his senior recital, she limited her reaction to the words: “That’s the best I’ve heard you play.” He added that her strongly remembered principles for students were to believe in the music and that a musician can always do better.

The program included filmed comments from many other students and former colleagues in the concert and academic worlds. Quite a few also were in Auer Hall to address her in person and to play. So, one heard quite a bit of interesting music, very well performed on a variety of viols in different shapes and sound ranges.

Among the highlights was the above-mentioned Byrne, making his way through a solo piece by Alfonso Ferrabosco II, featuring just about every touch of trickery and surprise. Also there were loving comments from her husband of 35 years, retired Jacobs School professor and tenor Paul Elliott and — as part of an ensemble encore — a solo by alto/countertenor Michael Walker of “Unforgettable,” directly and devotedly aimed at the humble Professor Gillespie.

I congratulate her. She’s been a musical blessing here.


Music review: BLEMF Harpsichordist Curtis Pavey

5/27/2017

 

Music review: BLEMF Harpsichordist Curtis Pavey
BLEMF kicks off with intimate concert
By Peter Jacobi H-T Music Reviewer May 26, 2017


Wylie House Museum is a former Bloomington home with history in its sinews. It is an intimate place, and into its quarters came an intimate event Wednesday evening featuring a fine young musician playing an intimate historical instrument.

The onetime home turned more intimate when enough folks arrived to fill what must have been the entire Wylie House’s first floor: the living and dining rooms and foyer. Filled is the proper word. Those in charge kept adding chairs, and when there were no more to add, quite a few of the visitors were left to stand throughout an event lasting in excess of an hour. They did so patiently; not a one that I could see, and I sat near the front door, left before the end.

The occasion was the opening of the awaited Bloomington Early Music Festival 2017, or BLEMF as we’ve come to more intimately call it. Chosen to open the five-day, nine-event celebration was Curtis Pavey, at the moment still a master’s student in Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and its Historical Performance Institute. He plays the piano and organ and harpsichord, the last of which he used for his Wednesday program. On that instrument, he proved himself to be an artist of considerable finish and even more promise.

Nothing he performed during his concert of delightful music from the 17th and 18th centuries, almost all of it either written by Italians or influenced by the musical styles of Italy in those centuries, lacked the necessary flavors or colors or touches or technical requirements that Baroque composers used to express themselves. Mr. Pavey may be young and may still be a master’s student, but he is already a master of the harpsichord, an instrument that asks of its users that they not only know how to smoothly use the keys but to imbue them with dollops of personality, an act far harder to accomplish, I’d say, than on the other keyboard music-makers he plays. He is an accomplished musician and contributed to his musicianship spoken comments — helpfully instructive, informal and succinct — that reinforced what he was trying to accomplish with his gifts for performing.

Pavey opened with a couple of charming toccatas by Girolamo Frescobaldi, laden with fugal enrichments, and followed them with the toccata of a German influenced by the Italians, Frescobaldi’s eminent German contemporary, Johann Jakob Froberger. To all these, Pavey gave grace and felicity. As he did to the Suite in A Minor of Louis Couperin, still another contemporary, part of whose composition honors the preceding item with a movement titled “Prelude l’imitation de Mr. Froberger,” followed with expectations of the period: an Allemande, Courante and Sarabande, all of them delivered with aplomb.

Two spirited Sonatas in A Major, K. 101 and 268, by the renowned 18th-century Italian Domenico Scarlatti, were played with bounteous verve. And then, Pavey focused on Bach, his “Italian Concerto,” towering above all the previous for its vitality and complexity. Bach described the music as “Keyboard Practice Consisting in a Concerto after the Italian Taste and an Overture after the French Manner for a Harpsichord with Two Manuals, Composed for Music Lovers to Refresh Their Spirits.”

It is all that, an attempt to imitate what an orchestra can accomplish. As such, it accomplishes quite a lot and does give the harpsichordist a profusion of challenges, all of which recitalist Pavey took excellent care of. He provided a fine reading that brought immediate cheers, fully deserved, from the audience.

His intimate concert in an intimate setting proved a pleasant way to spend a midweek evening and a promising start for BLEMF 2017.





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