Today we will be highlighting the achievements of 15-year-old violinist Mary Sliva. Mary was the Early Music category winner of the 2012 Walgreens Concerto Competition.
She has been playing violin for ten years and frequently performs around the Chicago area both as a soloist and in ensemble with her seven musical siblings. Mary gets lots of support from her family, her violin teacher Julie Maura Bickel and her musical family at Midwest Young Artists.
Part of Mary’s prize for winning the Walgreen’s Concerto Competition was the opportunity to record with world-renowned harpsichordist, David Schrader. Here is violinist Mary Sliva and harpsichordist David Schrader in the first movement—Allegro moderato—of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in a minor, BWV 1041.
We’ll be traveling to 17th century Italy now to hear the three-movement cantata “Clori mia, Clori bella” by the man who penned over 600 such works, Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725). In an era when cantatas rivaled operas for refinement and were considered the ultimate challenge to a composer’s artistry, Scarlatti was among the last to contribute significantly to the literature. The vast majority of Scarlatti’s cantatas were for solo soprano and continuo, and we will hear that combination, with the addition of director Gary Berkenstock playing recorder.
This month we are featuring the Italian baroque composer and violinist, Francesco Maria Veracini. Born in 1690 and living until 1768, Veracini came from a family of musicians and artists. Although hailing from Florence, Veracini spent much of his life playing all over Europe, including London, Prague, and Dresden. In 1722, Veracini tossed himself from a third story window, apparently in a fit of madness. This madness and eccentricity of Veracini is palpable in many of his works, as he pursued more progressive compositional styles.
While in Dresden, Veracini started using Overtures to introduce his sonatas, a practice which was unheard of in Italy up to that point. We’ll hear an example of that practice now in Veracini’s Sonata opus 1, number 1 in g minor. This performance is by Concitato.
Concitato (l to r: Ezra Seltzer, Jeffrey Grossman, and Joan Plana) (Photo courtesy of Concitato)
(Veracini’s Sonata in g minor is in five movements: Overture-Allegro, Aria, Paesana, Menuet and Giga-Allegro)
Not much is known about the Italian composer and clergyman, Diogenio Bigaglia. He was born in Venice around 1676 and died there in 1745. He composed several dozen sacred oratorios, masses, and motets, the majority of which have been lost. He also composed some instrumental works, including twelve violin sonatas and this month’s featured work, a sonata for recorder and continuo.
Many critics compare Bigaglia’s sonatas with the beautiful works of his more prolific contemporaries, Giovanni Bononcini, Benedetto Marcello, and Francesco Veracini. This Sonata in g minor is in four movements: Adagio, Allegro assai, Siciliana, and Giga. Here to perform it is Carolina Pro Musica, featuring Edward Ferrell, recorder.
Carolina Pro Musica performs Bigaglia’s Sonata in g minor:
Our featured composer for January is the 17th century Bohemian composer, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Biber was one of the finest violinists of his day and his violin sonatas continue to be performed with regularity. Biber also wrote a substantial amount of sacred instrumental and choral music, from which we will sample here.
Biber’s Missa Christi resurgentis was composed in 1674 while the composer was working in Salzburg. This mass, like so many of his sacred works, was originally meant to be performed in the Salzburg Cathedral, with different instrumental and vocal groups separated spatially throughout the church.
Biber (1644-1704)
Cambridge Concentus, (under the direction of Joshua Rifkin) performs the Gloria from Biber’s Missa Christi resurgentis in this live performance.
Title page of Marais' first book of Pièces de Violes (1686)
Marin Marais was a virtuoso gambist, performing with the royal orchestra of Louis XIV and the Académie Royale de Musique under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Lully. His skill at composition was also well known in his lifetime; in Le Parnasse François, by Titon du Tillet we learn “one finds everywhere in them good taste and a surprising variety.” Marais composed a few operas and trio sonatas, but the bulk of his output was music for his own basse de viole. Between the years 1686 and 1725, Marais composed five volumes of Pièces de Violes, the most substantial body of work ever written for that instrument. It is from the third volume, published in 1711, that we hear this month’s selection.
This month’s selection includes four Pièces in A minor from the Troisième Livre de Pièces de Viole of Marin Marais. The performers are Les Grâces, a baroque ensemble from the San Francisco bay area, who have just this month released an entire album of music of the French Baroque, titled Les Grâces Françoises.
In September 2011, Wayward Sisters (Ars Antigua Presents featured artists from earlier this year) won the Early Music America/Naxos recording competition. Recordings cost money, however (transportation, rehearsals, etc.) and Wayward Sisters could use some assistance in getting this project off the ground. They have set a modest monetary goal via Kickstarter, complete with excellent rewards for those that back this project. For all fans of early music, please consider giving to support these fine musicians, who will assuredly release an album that we all can enjoy.
In late 17th-century France, salons were the rage among poets, musicians and intellectual women, many of whom considered the salon setting a sort of informal university. Female composers would often utilize these salons to premiere works for the liberal-minded society in attendance.
Julie Pinel, who lived from the late 17th to early 18th-century was one of those composers who found a welcome home in the Parisian Salon. Coming from a family of musicians who included Germain Pinel, court lutenist to Louis XIV, Julie Pinel published a complete book of songs titled Nouveau recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire. It is from this work that we have drawn today’s selection: “Cantatille: Le Printems”. The lyrics of this lovely air tendre are typical of contemporary salon composers, making several references to nature and pastoral life.
La Donna Musicale have released an entire album devoted to Julie Pinel and her contemporaries.
La Donna Musicale (photo by Rick Friedman)
Julie Pinel: “Cantatille: Le Printems“
Recitatif: Le Dieu du jour nous rend lumière féconde,
Originally published in 1651 by John Playford, the first edition of The English Dancing Master contained over one hundred country dances and ballad airs. This extremely popular volume, which went through several editions over the subsequent 75 years, described the method of performing these dances, and gave a melodic line for each. As many musicians have done since the first publication of this work, Musica Pacifica have created their own arrangements of melodies from The English Dancing Master. Today, we will hear five of these virtuosic arrangements. First is “Newcastle,” which incorporates a two-part setting by violinist David Douglass, following that is the lively “Rufty Tufty,” and then a morose air called “Irish Lamentation.” The fourth dance is an up-tempo “Scotch Cap” and rounding out the selection will be the whimsical “Jack’s Maggot.”
A masterful musician who detested performing publicly, Nicola Matteis was an Italian-born violinist, guitarist and composer who spent much of his career in England. While we don’t have many hard facts about his life (we don’t even know his precise birth or death dates) we do know that Matteis had a reputation for being an arrogant and “inexpugnably proud” man who would only stoop to giving public concerts when his finances demanded it.
Importing an Italian performance style, Matteis became a key figure in the development of violin playing in England and his compositions displayed a variety of bowings that exceeded any found in English music up to that point. Matteis’ major contribution to the literature was four books of Ayres for the Violin, published between 1676 and 1687. Today, we will hear two movements from his Suite in d minor from Book Four of that work, performed by The Wayward Sisters. First is a melancholic adagio marked “A Grave Thing”. This is followed by a dancelike “Ground with Several Divisions”.
The Wayward Sisters (courtesy of Anna Steinhoff. Photo by Alyse Liebovich)
On this edition of Ars Antigua Presents, we’ll hear selections from Shakespeare’s Songbook: music and dialogue from the Bard’s plays.
Popular songs of Elizabethan England played an important role in many of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare frequently chose to insert these songs to reveal the thoughts and emotions of his characters or to help set the scene. Today’s selections provide a rare sonic glimpse at the rich soundscape of Shakespeare’s theater.
Robert Johnson, an English composer and lutenist, was a contemporary of Shakespeare. We will hear two of his best-known songs, “Full fathom five” and “Where the bee sucks,” which are settings of dialogue from the Bard’s final play, The Tempest. Following these, we will hear a brief ‘Shepherd’s Dance’ by Dutch composer and music publisher, Tielman Susato. This festive, early-16th century tune would have provided a fitting accompaniment to the shepherd’s scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
“If music be the food of love, play on.”