Baroque Orchestra

Dancing Through Time

orchestral suites by Lully Purcell Rameau

robert mealy Director

morse recital hall May 3, 2012

Robert Blocker, Dean

Dancing Through Time Orchestral Suites by Lully, Purcell, and Rameau

may 3, 2012 · morse recital hall · robert mealy, director jean-baptiste lully (1632–1687)

Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) Ouverture Premier Intermède: Entrée–Sarabande–Bourrée– Galliard–Canarie Danse des Tailleurs (La Gavotte) Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs Seconde air pour les Turcs Troisième air pour les Turcs Premier air des Espagnols Seconde air pour les Espagnols Chaconne des Scaramouches, Trivelins, et Arlequins

henry purcell (1659–1695)

Music from King Arthur, or the British Worthy (1691) Overture Aire, played while Merlin descends in a Chariot drawn

by Dragons Aire: Second Act introduction Hornpipe Song Tune: Fairest Isle Hornpipe Song Tune: How blest are Shepherds Symphony Chaconne: The Grand Dance Intermission

Robert Blocker, Dean

jean-philippe rameau (1683–1764)

Suite from Dardanus (1739) Ouverture Air pour les Plaisirs Air gracieux Tambourins I & II Air vif Rigaudons I & II Ritournelle vive Air gay en rondeau: Les NiaĂŻs de Sologne Menuets I & II Tambourins I & II Rondeau tendre: Sommeil Gavotte vive Chaconne

students of music 626/227 Rhetoric and Early Instrumental Performance

violin Robert Mealy director *Soo-Ryun Baek David Radzynski Jacob Ashworth Laura Keller Hyun Sun Sul *Tess Isaac Holly Piccoli Sung Mao Liang Eun-young Jung

viola *Colin Meinecke Dashiel Nesbitt Jonathan MacMillan Jessica Li Sara Rossi cello *Hannah Collins Jinhee Park Jacques Wood Paul Kerekes HÊlène Warner double bass Paul Nemeth

*Member of the Yale Baroque Ensemble

flute Cho-Long Kang Ginevra Petrucci Anouvong Liensavanh oboe Rebecca Kim Jinhee Park Kaitlin Taylor Caroline Ross Beau Gabriel percussion Michael Compitello (special guest)

robert mealy Director

One of America’s leading historical string players, Robert Mealy has been praised for his “imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring” (Boston Globe); the New Yorker described him as “New York’s world-class early music violinist.”

He has recorded over fifty cds on most major labels, ranging from Hildegard of Bingen with Sequentia, to Renaissance consorts with the Boston Camerata, to Rameau operas with Les Arts Florissants. Mr. Mealy has appeared at music festivals from Berkeley to Belgrade, and from Melbourne to Versailles; he has also performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group and accompanied Renée Fleming on the David Letterman Show. In New York he is a frequent leader and soloist with the New York Collegium, artek, the Clarion Society, and Early Music New York. Since 2004, he has been concertmaster for the distinguished Boston Early Music Festival

Orchestra, leading them in their Grammynominated recordings of Lully’s Thésée and Psyché and Conradi’s Ariadne. A devoted chamber musician, he is a member of the medieval ensemble Fortune’s Wheel, the Renaissance violin band the King’s Noyse, and the seventeenth-century ensemble Quicksilver.

Robert Mealy is a professor of music (adjunct) at Yale University, where he directs the Yale Collegium and teaches courses on rhetoric and performance; for a decade previously, he directed the Harvard Baroque Orchestra. In 2004 he received Early Music America’s Binkley Award for outstanding teaching at both Harvard and Yale.

Beginning this fall, Mr. Mealy will be Director of the Historical Performance graduate program at the Julliard School.

notes on the program Robert Mealy

Vauxhall Gardens by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827)

My annual hands-on performance practice class here at Yale ended up with an awkwardly elaborate name; it should really be called simply “Baroque as a Second Language.” It’s designed to give modern players a chance to learn how to speak the two major languages of the Baroque with a reasonably convincing accent.

of French Baroque music, a style that is less familiar to modern players but which is at the heart of so much of our core repertoire: the partitas and suites of Bach, for example. To begin with, we explored one of the masterpieces of the composer who virtually invented the French Baroque orchestra, Jean-Baptiste Lully — ironically himself a working-class Italian who In the fall semester, we concentrated on the managed to ascend to the highest circles of the Italian style, as perfected by Corelli and Vivaldi French court. and theatrically transformed by Handel. Our major project that term was a performance of Lully’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the most spectacHandel’s magnificent oratorio Solomon with the ular of his collaborations with Molière, integrates Yale Schola Cantorum, under the direction of a huge amount of music into its plot. In tonight’s Simon Carrington. Many of these players went excerpts, we first hear the dancing lesson of M. on to perform Handel with William Christie Jourdan, as he is shown the fashionable social and the Yale Philharmonia at Carnegie Hall steps of his day; he is then (over)dressed by earlier this term; the work they did in the fall his tailors, who dance a gavotte as they work. on Italian Baroque style had wonderful results in that collaboration.

The dénouement of the play, when the pretentious M. Jourdan agrees to undergo an absurd initiFor this spring term, we have focused on the ation ritual into what he thinks is Ottoman sophisticated dance language that is at the heart nobility, gives Lully a chance to try a pseudo-

Turkish style. The original Bourgeois Gentilhomme ended with something that is never included in modern productions: an enormous Ballet des Nations, from which we excerpt a few choice dances.

The French style in music came to England with the Restoration, along with other Continental fashions Charles II brought back with him from his exile abroad. Although the English were keen to learn the latest dances, they were less convinced by the idea of full-length operas.

They preferred a mixed form of spoken theater, dance, and song; in fact, rather close to what Lully had created with Molière.

The greatest genius of English music, Henry Purcell, contributed to several of these semioperas before his tragically early death. One of the last of these, a collaboration with the poet Dryden, attempted to integrate the music more fully into the plot. Much of the incidental music to King Arthur was published as a suite shortly after his death; we present about half of the colorful numbers included in this collection.

After the intermission, we hear from the most remarkable musician in eighteenth-century France. Jean-Philippe Rameau spent the first half of his life as a provincial organist and theoretician. At the age of fifty, he wrote his first opera, Hippolyte, which caused a musical revolution in Paris when it was premiered in 1733.

Six years later, the amazing score of Dardanus was finished. Despite a weak libretto, this opera contains some of his most vivid dances and airs: contemporary ballet-masters remarked that Rameau’s music actually taught them how to dance. I’ve put together a suite of varied entertainments from this fantastic work. I hope it gives as much delight in listening as we’ve had in discovering it.

I should add that it has been a great pleasure to work closely with these amazing students. I have been teaching this class for five years now at Yale, as a way of sharing some of the music I love the most. I first played all these works with a Baroque orchestra while I was an undergraduate, when I dropped out of Harvard to join Tafelmusik in Toronto; this music literally changed my life. I am very happy to have had the opportunity to bring this music to the students of Yale, and I look forward to seeing what they make of this wonderful repertoire in years to come!

upcoming events

http://music.yale.edu box office 203 432-4158 concerts & public relations Dana Astmann Danielle Heller Dashon Burton new media Monica Ong Reed Austin Kase operations Tara Deming Christopher Melillo piano curators Brian Daley William Harold recording studio Eugene Kimball

Ole Akahoshi, cello, & Elizabeth Parisot, piano Faculty Artist Series Fri | 8 pm | Morse Recital Hall | Free Ole Akahoshi, cello, and Elizabeth Parisot, piano. Mendelssohn: Variations concertantes in D major, Op. 17; Brahms: Sonata in E minor, Op. 38; Saint-Saens: Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 123; de Falla: Suite populaire Espagnole.

Matthew Barnson, composer Doctor of Musical Arts Recital Thu | 8 pm | Morse Recital Hall | Free Featuring Barnson’s three sonatas for violin and piano, plus Shattered Lines/Points of Horizon for solo piano.

Matt Wilson’s Arts and Crafts Ellington Jazz Series Fri | 8 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets $20–30, Students $10 Drummer Matt Wilson performs with Michael Rodriguez, trumpet, flugelhorn; Gary Versace, piano, organ, accordion; and Martin Wind, bass.

Robert Blocker, Dean