New Century Baroque
Baroque art is all about the interplay of light and shadow; about lush organic forms and great emotions. In music, this is perhaps most obvious and the easiest to observe in the concerto form, where there is on one hand a smaller mass of sometimes even only one player and on the other hand a large group of many players communicating and competing and thus creating a great variety of sounds and textures. The concerto still is perhaps the most popular form in the orchestral classical music repertoire these days because of its endless possibilities, the play between what is intimate and what is common, and flexibility and freedom of the performer.
The concerto has its roots in stile concertato style that originates from the late Renaissance polychoral style of for instance Andrea Gabrieli in the Basilica of St.Mark where ensembles of singers and musicians were situated in different parts of the church, took turns and thus "competed" against each other. The birth of the instrumental concerto in late 17th century Italy followed two parallel main lines: namely the Roman and the Venetian one. The main difference between the two was that the Roman concerto was developed from the trio sonata tradition (three parts) and the Venetian was developed from the solo part that was accompanied and contrasted by an ensemble of two violin parts, a viola part and a bass part (five parts). With respect to the Roman concerto, the basic point to keep in mind is that the three basic parts are played by different instrumental combinations and the tone colour, weight and volume changes are effected through variety in instrumentation – as in the Venetian one the point is more the one of a heroic soloist fighting against the mass of the orchestra, both through playing simultaneously and through the alteration of solo and ritornello passages. The Venetian concerto has lived until our days, transforming itself from the Vivaldi concerti to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and numerous other well known examples all the way until contemporary compositions.
Arcangelo Corelli has been attributed to having "invented" the Roman concerto grosso form. Whether or not it was exactly him can be traced to the late 1670s when this new type of composing music evolved. During those times and until the early 1700s Rome was a flourishing centre of European music culture where people from the whole continent gathered to study and work. Corelli's students and colleagues of fame included Francesco Geminiani and Georg Friedrich Händel, who had Corelli leading the violin section in performances of his oratorio La Resurrezione in 1708. One of the first published works in the new style was the sonata collection Armonico Tributo by Georg Muffat in 1682, written when he had already left Rome to work in Salzburg. Corelli's own Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 weren't published until 1714, a few years after the composer's death. Händel's concerti grossi weren't composed during his stay in Italy, but during a longer period of time from circa 1710 until the 1740s. An interesting link between the Montisi Festival and the birth of the instrumental concerto is the 1658 de Zentis harpsichord that is situated in Montisi nowadays. It might have been commissioned by the abdicated queen Christina of Sweden, who turned Catholic (a strong point made by the daughter of the great defender of the Lutheran faith, the warrior king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden) and lived the rest of her life in Rome. She was a great lover of arts in general and is known to have been a financial and artistic supporter of Corelli.
The great Johann Sebastian Bach never stuck to one stylistic idiom in his composing. This is the case also when it comes to the concerto, he was at home with both the Roman and the Venetian concerto form. The Brandenburg concertos can be seen as developments from the concerto grosso form, the rest of his concerti are in the Vivaldian style, in which there is more clearly a soloist versus an orchestra. All the Bach concerti for one or more harpsichords BWV 1052-1065, date from 1730s and are most probably adaptations from earlier concerti from his time in Cöthen except for BWV 1057 which is a version of the fourth Brandenburg concerto and the concerto for four harpsichords which is a version of the Vivaldi concerto for four violins RV 580. Most of the concerti have only the harpsichord version surviving, only three single harpsichord concerti and the BWV 1060 double harpsichord concerto that are adaptations from Bach's own violin concerti have their originals preserved to our time. None of them were published in Bach's time and it was only in the mid 1800's that the Bach-Gesellschaft and the Kistner house (among other publishers) started issuing commercial editions of them.
The concerto for harpsichord BWV 1052 in D minor is perhaps the most known of all the Bach keyboard concerti, made famous when Glenn Gould recorded it with Leonard Bernstein in 1957 following the huge artistic and commercial success of his debut recording of the Goldberg variations in 1955. It has its presumed roots in a lost violin concerto, but it also has material from Cantatas BWV 146 and 188 that have survived. It is virtuosic compared to many Bach concerti and still retains a great deal of violin textures also in its keyboard form. The solo harpsichord has only one single silence in the whole piece (just before the small free cadenza-like section in the first movement) and especially the third movement has an exhausting perpetuum mobile -feeling to it. The concerto for three harpsichords BWV 1064 is thought to be a transcription of a lost concerto for three violins, it is texturally speaking very busy and the solo parts are almost equal when it comes to the amount of soloistic material. There have been several attempts to reconstruct the original violin concerto and many of them have also been recorded.
Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian, took the concerto form to even greater heights with some 40-odd essays in that form (for flute, cello, and oboe in addition to numerous concerti for keyboard instruments). His d-minor concerto for the harpsichord (Wq. 23) dates from 1748, when he was serving as court harpsichordist to Frederick the Great in Potsdam and was at the vanguard of the most cutting-edge trends in German composition. Virtuosic and characterised by great contrasts between various moods and sentiments, this greatly passionate concerto could only be written by someone who was as well-trained in performance and composition as C.P.E. Bach would have been. While it differs in flavour from the staunchly Baroque works of his father, in terms of compositional perfection and a strong Rhetorical sense it is first and foremost a work of the 'Bach school.' In contrasts to Sebastian Bach's harpsichord concerti, C.P.E. Bach's harpsichord concerti take advantage of mid-eighteenth century advances in harpsichord building, particularly with respect to the use of a wider compass. Most importantly, Wq. 23 strays perhaps the farthest from the Venetian model -- here, the soloist is really posed 'against' the orchestra rather than emanating from it, resulting in a dramatically heightened sense of musical reality.
Matias Häkkinen & Mahan Esfahani 2011
Program
Friday July 1 - Concert - Castelmuzio
21:00 - Santo Stefano
New Century Baroque
Direction: Matias Häkkinen
Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759):
Concerto grosso Opus 3 No. 2 B flat major (London 1734)
Vivace - Grave
Largo
Allegro
[Minuet]
[Gavotte]
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750):
Concerto for harpsichord, strings & continuo No. 1 in D minor, BWV 1052
I Allegro
II Adagio
III Allegro
Matias Häkkinen, harpsichord
INTERVAL
Archangelo Corelli (1653-1713):
Concerto grosso Opus 6 No. 4 D major (Amsterdam 1714)
Adagio – Allegro
Adagio
Vivace
Allegro – Giga: Presto
Georg Muffat (1653-1704):
Sonata V G major (Armonico tributo , Salzburg 1682)
Allemanda grave
Adagio – Fuga
Adagio – Allegro – Adagio
Passacaglia grave
• Tickets at the door 15.-, 25.- €
Program
Saturday July 2 - Concert - Castelmuzio
21:00 - Santo Stefano
New Century Baroque
Direction: Matias Häkkinen
Guest soloist: Mahan Esfahani
Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759):
Concerto grosso Opus 6 No. 12 B minor (London 1740)
Largo
Allegro
Larghetto, e piano
Largo
Allegro
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788):
Concerto for harpsichord in D minor, Wq.23 (H.427)
I Allegro
II Poco andante
III Allegro assai
Mahan Esfahani, harpsichord
INTERVAL
Georg Muffat (1653-1704):
Sonata II G minor (Armonico tributo, Salzburg 1682)
Grave – Allegro
Grave – Forte e allegro
Aria (Gavotte)
Grave – Sarabanda
Grave
Borea
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750):
Concerto for 3 harpsichords, strings & continuo in C major, BWV 1064
I Allegro
II Adagio
III Allegro assai
Mahan Esfahani
Matias Häkkinen
Anna-Riikka Santapukki, harpsichord
Direction and Harpsichord:
Matias Häkkinen
Guest soloists:
Mahan Esfahani
Anna-Riikka Santapukki
Violins:
Naomi Burrell
Daniela Henzinger
Raphaelle Pacault
Sara Uneback
Viola:
Marina Barredo
Cello:
Oleguer Aymami
Double bass:
Marco Lo Cicero
Oboes:
Thomas Meraner
Philipp Wagner
Bassoon:
Anna Flumiani
Clavicembali di Bruce Kennedy
• Tickets at the door 10.-, 25.- € |
