Author: Joshua Sauvageau

One of the great harpsichordists of his time, and court composer to Louis XIV, Francois Couperin helped incorporate Italian melodic concepts into French baroque forms. Couperin wrote four volumes of harpsichord music, published between 1713 and ’30, which contain over 200 solo works that could also be played in small chamber ensembles. The composer grouped these pieces into ordres that were made up of short dance movements and character pieces, many of which Couperin and colleagues performed each Sunday at Versailles.

Today we will transport ourselves back to one of these Sunday gatherings at the court of Louis XIV as we listen to Francois Couperin’s Ritratto dell’amore for recorder and continuo as performed by Les Graces.

 

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels.

If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

 

 

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

[15’33”]

 

Born in Northern Italy, Maria Xaveria Peruchona (ca. 1652-after 1709) joined the Collegio di Sant’Orsola, a religious convent for women, in 1668. Contemporary accounts indicated that Peruchona was a fine singer and organist, and she no doubt studied with Isabella Leonarda who was one of the most prolific female composers of that time. Peruchona devoted the majority of her life to the religious orders, but also composed several sacred motets and anthems.

Maria Xaveria Peruchona’s motet “Ad Gaudia, ad jubila” from a live performance by Carolina Pro Musica.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

 

 

Hailing from Verona, Evaristo Felice dall’Abaco was a baroque violinist and composer. Born in 1675 to a skilled guitarist, dall’Abaco received some of the best musical training available, and may even have been a student of Giuseppi Torelli. He spent most of his life composing and performing in his native Italy, but in 1715, he was appointed Concert-meister at court in Munich, where he would remain until his death in 1742. Dall’Abaco’s oeuvre is rather slight, consisting of only six known Opuses. These works are primarily sonatas and concerti in the style of his contemporary, Antonio Vivaldi. It is from dall’Abaco’s Opus 2 Dodici Concerti a Quattro da Chiesa, that we will hear today’s selection, in four movements: Largo, Allegro e Spiritoso, Grave, and Allegro.

Concerti a Quattro da Chiesa in g minor, Op. 2 No. 5 of dall’Abaco, as performed by the Atascocita High School Chamber Strings.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

 

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

[9’22”]

Based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo has come down through history as one of the earliest operas to employ the full resources of the orchestra. Monteverdi’s use of polyphony, and especially his innovative orchestration, dazzled audiences at the 1607 Premiere. The original score called for about a dozen vocalists and over forty instrumentalists, including brass, winds, strings, harpsichord, organ, and percussion. In L’Orfeo Symphonia, we will hear some of the memorable tunes from that opera, performed on period strings and continuo.

Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo Symphonia, as performed by the Baroque Ensemble of Brigham Young University-Idaho, under the direction of Robert Tueller.

Video for L’Orfeo Symphonia

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

[12’55”]

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre is best remembered as the first French woman to write an opera (Cephale et Procris in 1694). She was born into a family of musicians and performed upon the harpsichord for Louis XIV when she was just five years old. According to contemporary accounts, she was a virtuosic keyboard player, dazzling audiences at court and in her home. Her oevre includes stage music, cantates, a book of pièces de clavessin, several sonatas for violin and continuo and some trio sonatas.

This is Jacquet de la Guerre’s Trio Sonata in D Major, performed by La Donna Musicale.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

[10’11”]

 

Working and living almost exclusively in early-eighteenth century Paris, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault was primarily an organist. While employed in the Parisian churches of Grands-Augustins and Saint-Sulpice, he honed his skills as a composer. While Clérambault was organist and choir director at the royal house of Saint-Cyr he developed the French Cantata form and was widely heralded as the master of the genre.

Many of Clérambault’s secular cantatas were concerned with Greco-Roman subjects and have titles like Orphée, Apollon, and La mort d’Hercule. We will now hear a selection from one of these secular cantatas, titled Léandre et Héro. This is a Récitatif and Air fort et tendre from Léandre et Héro of Cantates françoises, livre II by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. This performance is by Génération Harmonique.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

[8:03]

Thomas Tallis was truly a Tudor composer. With a life that spanned most of the sixteenth century, Tallis served the royal court under Henry VIII, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Under Elizabeth, Tallis, along with William Byrd, was granted a twenty-one year monopoly on polyphonic music, as well as a patent to publish and print their music. While the Tudors ushered in the Protestant Reformation, many scholars believe that Tallis remained a devout Catholic. Written during the Protestant Queen Elizabeth’s reign, “The Lamentations of Jeremiah” are often cited as an example of a true expression of the composer’s faith.

Most of the information that we have regarding Giovanni Battista Fontana comes from the preface of a posthumously published collection of his compositions. Published in 1641, eleven years after his death from the plague, Fontana’s lone collection consisted of sonatas for one, two, or three parts. His own instrument was the violin, a fact that is artfully announced in the preface:

Fontana was one of the most singular violin virtuosi of his time. He was well known not only in his native city, but also in Venice, Rome and finally Padua, where like a dying swan, he displayed more marvelously than ever the sweetness of his music…

 

The music within Fontana’s collection varies quite drastically in style and notational method, reflecting trends in Italian sonata composition during the first third of the seventeenth century.

We will now listen to a selection for violin and continuo from Fontana’s Sonate per il violino, o cornetto, fagotto, chitarone, violincino o simile altro istromento (Sonatas for violin or cornetto, bassoon, chitarrone, violincello, or other similar instruments). Concitato performs Fontana’s Sonata No. 2 in D Major for violin and continuo…

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

[8:55]

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

During Antonio Vivaldi’s extended tenure at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, he composed two settings of the Gloria (he is rumored to have written a third Gloria, but this setting has been lost). These two sacred works were virtually forgotten upon the death of Vivaldi in 1741 and only returned to the repertoire in 1939.

It was during “Vivaldi Week” in Siena that year that Alfredo Casella—an Italian composer and devotee of Debussy—revived several Vivaldi compositions, including the Gloria, RV 589. This masterwork has since become one of the most popular sacred Baroque pieces. Our ensemble this month is the University of North Texas Collegium Singers & Baroque Orchestra, under the direction of Richard Sparks.

Vivaldi’s Gloria, RV 589: Gloria, Et in terra pax, Laudamus te, Gratias agimus tibi, and Propter magnam gloriam.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

Vivaldi Gloria (University of North Texas Collegium Singers & Baroque Orchestra)

Victoria Requiem (University of North Texas Collegium Singers)

[12:47]

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

Nicolas Bernier was an Italian-influenced French composer of motets and cantatas who lived from 1664 until 1734. Bernier is a lesser-known composer of the French baroque, who belonged to the generation that came between Lully and Rameau. Although he spent his formative years in Italy, he returned to Paris and held many different musical posts in churches there.

In 1711, Bernier published some works in his Troisième livre des cantates françoises. From this collection comes a cantata, which, interestingly, is in praise of coffee; a beverage that was unknown in France until 1669. The vocal melody and instrumental coloration of Le Caffé evokes an exotic quality, in keeping with early-18^th century Europeans’ feelings towards this captivatingly foreign beverage. There are three airs, along with a prelude and three recitatives that make up Le Caffé, and the first of these resembles a sarabande. The poetry for this air, written by Bernier’s contemporary, Louis Fuzelier, describes the delights of caffeine-induced insomnia.

We will now listen to that first air from Bernier’s Le Caffé. This is Air Gracieux: Gracieusement, and it is performed by Les Grâces…

 

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau

[9:04]

By the late 17^th century, the term “consort music” had given way to such now familiar terms as concert, concerto, and sonata. For the century prior, and especially in the Jacobean era, consort music was extraordinarily popular in England. It was in the twilight of consort music that the publisher John Carr compiled an anthology of several consorts and airs, which was titled Tripla Concordia.

A few years later, in the twilight of his own life, the sometime theatrical composer and organist Matthew Locke edited Carr’s anthology and added three of his own suites. This was likely the last consort music Locke ever wrote, as he died a little later in that year (1677). Consort music represented the bulk of Locke’s compositions, but oddly he hadn’t composed any for nearly twenty years prior to the publication of Tripla Concordia. The structure of the three suites he submitted closely resembled some of his own theater music.

The Wayward Sisters are a group of young performers who met at Oberlin Conservatory. They were winners of the 2011 Early Music America/Naxos Recording Competition.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

[11:34]

Probably the greatest Spanish Renaissance composer, Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in Avila in 1548. He began his musical career as a choirboy at Avila Cathedral and by 1565 was enrolled as a singer at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico in Rome. While there, he composed his first motets under the tutelage of Palestrina. As an organist and maestro di cappella, Victoria held various posts during his time in Italy. He continued composing motets, hymns, and masses which won him great acclaim in his native Spain. He returned home in 1587, composing polychoral masses, Magnificat settings and psalms until his death in 1611.

The nine-part Missa pro victoria was composed in 1600 to celebrate the Treaty of Vervins. This mass, apparently a favorite of King Philip III, is one of several Spanish battle masses that was partly based upon Clément Janequin’s 1528 chanson, La guerre. It is from the Missa pro victoria that we will hear this month’s selections, Gloria, Sanctus, and Benedictus. The performers are a Chicago-based a cappella ensemble, the Marion Consort, under the direction of Amy Bearden.

 

The Marion Consort specializes in choral music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque periods and will be performing again in Chicago on the last weekend of July, 2012. Be sure to check in with us here at Ars Antigua Presents for more details.

Ars Antigua Presents promotes the work of early music students at the high school and college levels. If you know of an ensemble that represents this next generation of performers, let us know and they may be featured on our podcast.

 

Podcast produced by Joshua Sauvageau