Yale Collection of Musical Instruments presents
Q u i c k s i lv e r B a r o Q u e
in
Violini a due:
Works for Two Violins and Continuo 15 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven 31 March 2019 3:00 p.m.
Yale Collection of Musical Instruments 15 Hillhouse Avenue New Haven
31 March 2019 3:00 pm
Robert Mealy & Julie Andrijeski, violins & directors Avi Stein, harpsichord; Charles Weaver, theorbo & guitar
Andrea Falconieri (c. 1585-1656)
L’Eroica, sonata a tre from Il primo livro di Canzone, Sinfonie, Fantasie, Naples, 1650
Giovanni Battista Fontana (1589-1630)
Sonata undecima from Sonate a 1. 2. 3. per il violino..., Venice, 1641
Dario Castello (fl. early 17th century)
Sonata prima from Sonate Concertate in Stil Moderno, Libro II, Venice, 1629
Nicolaus à Kempis (c.1600-1676)
Sinfonia no.2 “Dolorosa” from Symphoniae, Brussels, c. 1644-50
Dieterich Buxtehude (c.1637-1707)
Prelude in g minor, BuxWV 163
Johann Kaspar Kerll (1627-1693)
Sonata a 2 from Rost MS, Baden-Baden, c. 1660
Johann Schmeltzer (c.1623-1680)
Polnische Sackpfeiffen
Interval
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Johann Rosenmüller (c. 1619-1684)
Sonata seconda a due from Sonate a 2. 3. 4. e 5. Stromenti da arco & altri, Nuremberg, 1682
Santiago de Murica (1673-1739)
Follias Gallegas Marizapalos from Saldívar Codex No. 4, Madrid, c.1722
Andrea Falconieri (c. 1585-1656)
Follias echa para mi Señora Doña Tarolilla di Carallenos
Maurizio Cazzati (1616-1678)
Sonata decima from Suonate, Op. 18, Venice, 1656
Nicola Matteis (fl. 1672-1699)
Ground in D la sol re per fa la mano from Other Ayres and pieces, the fourth part, London, 1676
Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690)
Sonata terza from La cetra, Libro Terzo Op. 10, Venice, 1673
Dario Costello (fl. early 17c)
Sonata quarta from Sonate Concertate in Stil Moderno, Libr0 II Venice, 1629
Harpsichord by François Etienne Blanchet the Elder, Paris, ca. 1740
This concert is being recorded and streamed live over the internet. Please turn off all cellphones and electronic devices. Photography or the recording of this program is strictly prohibited 3
Program Notes The turn of the seventeenth century was a transformative moment in our Western cultural history. The world became modern: new technologies were emerging, a mercantile economy was developing, Galileo was proving that the earth was not at the center of the universe, people were suddenly aware of larger perspectives and new ways of regarding our world. Among the cultural revolutions was one in music. Composers consciously began to create a nuove musiche or stile moderno of dramatic oppositions and vivid emotions, in striking contrast to the smooth tapestry of Renaissance polyphony. Today’s concert is an examination of this new music, and of that new invention, the sonata: a pure instrumental work, a piece simply meant to be “sounded,” with no agenda but the imagination of the composer – and no standard formal shape except the passionate give-and-take of friends in conversation. We begin our program in Naples. Today we think of this city as firmly Italian, but it was actually part of the Spanish empire (along with most of southern Italy) until well into the eighteenth century. The works of the Neapolitan composer Andrea Falconieri are full of the influence of Spanish dance: sometimes directly, in his Follias, other times less overtly, like in his wonderful Sonata L’Eroica, which after a brisk opening suddenly moves into a very sexy passacalle. One of the most remarkable violinists of the early seventeenth century was G.B. Fontana, who worked not only in Venice but in Brescia and Padua as well. According to the one posthumous collection of his sonatas, he was a victim of the “voracity of the pestilence” that swept through northern Italy in the early 1630’s. His Sonata undecima is characteristic for its almost visionary sweetness, as well as the unexpected, quirky turns of its musical rhetoric. The early sonata is full of abrupt transitions, passionate harmonies, and quirky dance rhythms. One of the most impressive masters of this stile moderno is a composer whom we know absolutely nothing about, the splendidly-named Dario Castello. We have no records of his birth, his death, or even of his professional career, except what he mentions on the title page of his two books of sonatas, where he is described as “head of the wind band at San Marco.” His works, full of unexpected juxtapositions and harmonic swerves, went through two printings, and circulated widely in manuscript: a sign that his contemporaries appreciated his vividly theatrical works. We then hear from a Flemish composer, Nicolaus a Kempis, who makes much of the characteristic melancholia pervasive in this difficult century in a sonata literally called Dolorosa. Little is known about Kempis: some musicologists think he was originally Florentine before moving to Brussels, where he became organist at one of the city’s principal churches.
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The great organist Diederich Buxtehude is one of the few figures from this time to be a familiar name today, thanks to the virtuosic demands of his keyboard writing and a compositional style that combines strict counterpoint with wild flights of fancy. Tonight we hear one of his keyboard preludes, a work that is particularly idiomatic for the harpsichord. Like so many of his compositions, this is firmly in the form of the stylus fantasticus, marked by abrupt discontinuities and unexpected turns of phrase. J.K. Kerll’s Sonata a 2 combines the Italian taste for extravagant violin writing with a characteristically South German lyric melancholy. This work is taken from the huge anthology assembled by Franz Rost, whose manuscript of 157 trio sonatas managed to be preserved by the bibliophile and composer Brossard, whose library remains in the Bibliothèque Nationale today. J.K. Kerll was a student of Carissimi and Froberger; after serving as Kapellmeister in Munich, he ended his career in Vienna as organist to the Emperor. Along with virtuoso sonatas, the musical entertainments of the courts also included less refined pleasures. Johann Schmeltzer, the first native-born Kapellmeister at the Imperial court, spent much of his time in Vienna providing musical entertainments for the music-loving Emperor Leopold I. His wonderfully vivid portrait of Polish bagpipers combines a number of folk tunes with more courtly material. Its ending is particularly eccentric: a tune fragment played in unison that just peters out to nothing. One of the more unexpected musical visitors to Venice in the seventeenth century was the great German composer Johann Rosenmüller. A citizen of Leipzig, Rosenmüller had been in line to take over as Thomaskantor there when he was arrested in 1655 with some of his students on suspicion of homosexuality, and jailed. Forced to flee, he ended up in Venice where he worked as a trombonist at San Marco and taught at the Pietà, doing the same work as Vivaldi did fifty years later. This dramatic trajectory transformed Rosenmüller’s musical style as well as his career. His early instrumental music from Leipzig was mostly in the form of dance suites, but once he got to Venice, he discovered the power of operatic melody and theatrical gesture. His late set of sonatas published in 1682 (some of which were preserved in Bach’s personal library) combine heartbreaking adagios with dramatic, precipitous allegros. The Spanish guitar virtuoso Santiago de Murcia seems to have served as guitar teacher to the Queen of Spain in the early 1700’s. His compositions, which survive largely in three important manuscripts, include some the earliest examples of classic Spanish dances like the fandango, jota, and seguidilla. The Marizapalos was a popular Spanish dance-song of the time: it begins “Marizápalos was a young girl, head over heels in love with Pedro Martín; she was the priest’s niece, the jewel of the village, the flower of Madrid.”
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The Bolognese composer Maurizio Cazzati spent much of his career transforming the musical establishment of the enormous church of San Petronio in his native town. During Cazzati’s time there, he created a regular ensemble of some thirty-five players, and published a good deal of imaginative and inventive chamber music for them to play, among them the sonata we play today. With Nicola Matteis, we turn to one of the more exotic musical visitors in 17thcentury London. Four years later after his arrival in 1670, the diarist John Evelyn wrote that “I heard that stupendious Violin Signor Nicholao… he had a stroak so sweete, & made it speake like the Voice of a man… he plaied such ravishing things on a ground as astonish’d us all.” Mattteis’s compositions (especially his grounds) have the brilliance and energy of Italianate sonata writing, combined with the spiciness of what he described as “false consonances.” Giovanni Legrenzi’s third sonata from his 1673 collection La Cetra is an excellent example of how the sonata was changing by mid-century, influenced by the lyricism of Venetian opera composers like Cavalli and Cesti. The overlapping dissonances heard in the opening of this sonata were later to become a staple in the works of Arcangelo Corelli. Legrenzi dedicated this publication to Emperor Leopold I, perhaps hoping to land a job at the Hapsburg court in Vienna, but to no avail. We close with another example of Castello’s fantastical art. The extravagant form of his Sonata quarta actually follows the classical structure of an oration, with an introduction, a setting-forth of the terms of the argument, a discussion of opposing ideas, and a final closing speech. Castello puts this discourse in especially vivid musical figures, including virtuosic passagework, declamatory solos, and a dramatic close. (In his preface, Castello recommends trying these pieces out once or twice before performing them, “for nothing is hard to those who love it.”) --Robert Mealy
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About the Performers One of America’s most prominent historical string players, Robert Mealy (co-director, violin) has been praised for his “imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring” (Boston Globe). A frequent soloist and orchestral leader, Mr. Mealy is principal concertmaster at Trinity Wall Street and the Orchestra Director of the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra; he recently received a Grammy for his work with BEMF. He has also led the Mark Morris Dance Group Music Ensemble in performances here and in Moscow, accompanied Renee Fleming on the David Letterman Show, and recorded and toured a wide variety of repertoire with many distinguished ensembles both here and in Europe. Committed to education as well as performing, he directs Juilliard’s distinguished Historical Performance Program. From 2003 to 2015, he taught at Yale, directing the postgraduate Yale Baroque Ensemble and the Yale Collegium Musicum. Prior to that, he taught at Harvard for over a decade, where he founded the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra. In 2004, he received EMA’s Binkley Award for outstanding teaching and scholarship. He has recorded over 80 CDs on most major labels. Lauded for her “invigorating verve and imagination” (Washington Post), Julie Andrijeski (co-director, violin) is among the leading baroque violinists and early music pedagogues in the U.S. In addition to co-directing Quicksilver, she maintains an active performance schedule, playing with many diverse early music groups across the nation including the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra (Artistic Director), New York State Baroque (Concertmaster), Apollo’s Fire (Principal Player), and Les Délices. As a fulltime Senior Instructor at Case Western Reserve University and Teacher of Baroque Violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Ms. Andrijeski leads classes in historical performance practices, teaches lessons in baroque violin, and directs the baroque music and dance ensembles. Her combined skills in music and dance often culminate in workshops and special teaching engagements at schools such as the Oberlin Conservatory, Indiana University, Juilliard, the University of Colorado – Boulder, and at several summer workshops as well. Her recordings can be found on Acis Productions, Dorian Recordings, Centaur, Koch, CPO, Avie, and Musica Omnia. Avi Stein (harpsichord) is Associate Organist and Chorusmaster at Trinity Wall Street, teaches at The Juilliard School, and serves as artistic director of the Helicon Foundation. The New York Times described him as “a brilliant organ soloist” in his Carnegie Hall debut and he was featured in an Early Music America magazine article on the new generation of leaders in the field. He is an active continuo player appearing regularly with the Boston Early Music Festival, Quicksilver, the Clarion Music Society and Bach Vespers NYC. Mr. Stein directed the young artists’ program at the Carmel Bach Festival and has conducted a variety of ensembles including Opera Français de New York, OperaOmnia, Amherst Festival opera and the critically acclaimed 4×4 Festival. This summer he will direct the International Baroque Academy at Musiktheater
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Bavaria. He studied at Indiana University, Eastman School of Music, University of Southern California and was a Fulbright scholar in Toulouse. Lutenist and music theorist Charles Weaver is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, where he teaches historical plucked instruments and Baroque music theory. He was music director for Cavalli’s La Calisto with New York’s Dell’Arte Opera in 2017, when The Observer remarked on “the superb baroque band led by Charles Weaver...it was amazing to hear what warm and varied sounds he coaxed from the ensemble.” He has served as assistant conductor for Juilliard Opera, and accompanied operas with the Yale Baroque Opera Project and the Boston Early Music Festival. Chamber music appearances include Quicksilver, Piffaro, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Folger Consort, Apollo’s Fire, Blue Heron, and Musica Pacifica. He also works with the New York Continuo Collective, an ensemble of players and singers exploring seventeenth-century vocal music in semester-length workshop productions. He has taught at the Lute Society of America Summer Workshop, the International Baroque Institute at Longy, and the Madison Early Music Festival. He is associate director of music at St. Mary’s Church in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he specializes in Renaissance polyphony and Gregorian chant. In the fall of 2019, he will begin doctoral studies in music theory at the City University of New York.
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This concert is made possible by the generous support of the Associate Members of the Collection.
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upcoming performanceS in The 2018-2019 SeaSon April 8
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The SebaSTianS “Everywhere sharp-edged and engaging.� --The New York Times
April 28
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a & a harpSichord duo Danse Macabre: a Program of Madness and Love, Life and Death
Our concert hall seats only 98 people. If you are a ticket subscriber who is unable to attend a specific concert in our series, please let us know, as we may be able to share your ticket with someone else who would like to attend. 203-432-0822
Tickets may be ordered by telephone from the Yale School of Music box office at (203)432-4158 or over the Internet at: www.yale.edu/music Tickets
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$30.00 each, reserved seating $125.00, series of 5 concerts $25.00 each, senior citizens & Yale staff $15.00 each, students $25.00 each, Associate Member $100.00 series, Associate Member
cover image Claude Lorrain Landscape with Apollo Guarding the Herds of Admetus French, 1645 Oil on canvas, 55 x 45 cm Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome