The Characters of the Dance: Baroque Dance Suites

the characters of the dance Orchestral Suites from the Baroque november 18, 2009 · sprague memorial hall

Johann Sebastian Bach 1685-1750

Ouverture No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068 Ouverture Air Gavotte I – II Bourrée Gigue

Jean-Philippe Rameau 1683-1764

Two Suites of Dances from Rameau’s Operas Ouverture from Naïs (1749) Air pour les Plaisirs from Dardanus (1739) Rigaudons I & II from Naïs Gavotte vive from Naïs Tambourins I & II from Dardanus Entrée des Lutteurs—Chaconne— Air de triomphe from Naïs Entrée de Polymnie from Les Boréades (1763) Tonnerre from Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) Sommeil (Rondeau tendre) from Dardanus Menuets I & II from Naïs Tambourins I & II from Dardanus Chaconne from Les Indes galantes (1735)

Robert Blocker, Dean

baroque chamber orchestra Students of Music 626: Rhetoric and Early Instrumental Performance

violins

viola

bass

trumpet

Robert Mealy, director Benjamin Charmot Katie Hyun Jennifer Hsiao* Marjolaine Lambert Daniel Lee Anastasia Metla Hanna Na Ka Chun Gary Ngan Sae Niwa Evan Shallcross David Southorn

Colin Meinecke Eve Tang Vesselin Todorov Christopher Williams Minjung Chun

Aleksey Klushnik Mark Wallace

Douglas Lindsey Andreas Stoltzfus* David Wharton

flute Christopher Matthews Itay Lantner

percussion

oboe

harpsichord

Steven Kramer Andrew Parker

Avi Stein*

bassoon

*guest performers

Denis Petrunin*

cello Laura Usiskin Wonsun Keem Philo Lee Kyung Mi Anna Preuss Sifei Wen Jacques Wood

Micahla Cohen Jeremy Friedland

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 50 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 17c ensemble Quicksilver.

Mr. Mealy is 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.

notes on the program

Tonight’s program is the result of a semesterlong investigation into the forms and styles of the Baroque dance suite. Students in Mus 626, Rhetoric and Early Instrumental Performance, have spent their time learning the musical vocabulary of the various baroque dances, listening to different examples of how they could be performed, reading about these dances, and even learning to dance a minuet themselves.

We begin our program with Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite. In its final form, this was probably written around 1731 for Bach’s Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of students and professionals (somewhat like tonight’s group!) who met weekly to perform in Zimmermann’s coffee-house on the Leipzig town square. It is largely by chance that any of the orchestral suites have survived; they aren’t mentioned in C.P.E. Bach’s obituary of his father, nor in Forkel’s pioneering biography of 1802. A good deal of Bach’s chamber music was probably lost or destroyed - Christoph Wolff estimates that, from Bach’s Cöthen years alone, we are missing something like 250 works - so we are lucky to have the four suites that have come down to us intact. Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite may well have existed in an earlier version, without trumpets and timpani. Like all of Bach’s suites, and indeed following standard German practice of the time, a large-scale Ouverture (with its characteristic slow dotted opening followed by a brilliant, fast fugal section) introduces a series of dances. In the case of the Third Suite, the following movements are a somewhat unusual selection: first a slow Air, made famous by 19c arrangements, and then a pair of Gavottes, a brisk Bourrée, and a final Gigue. In tonight’s performance, the trumpeters are performing

on original, valveless straight trumpets, which produce a much more flexible and mellower sound than their modern counterparts.

Our suite of Rameau dances are taken from the various operas that Rameau began to compose in Paris at the age of fifty, after a lengthy career as theory teacher and organist in the provinces.

In these operas, he decisively transformed the language of French music into something far richer and more expressive than had previously been attempted: critics remarked that his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, included enough music for ten operas, and were shocked by the harmonic audacities that Rameau introduced.

Among Rameau’s other radical transformations, his reworking of the standard French overture is particularly striking: our first suite begins with the overture to his opera Naïs, which depicts a battle in heaven between the gods and the giants, and makes only the slightest acknowledgement of the standard two-part overture form. The dances which follow have all been chosen to highlight Rameau’s wonderful sense of orchestral color: note particularly his love of high obbligato bassoon lines, and the varied contrasts he creates between the wind band and the strings. Along with the various dances that enrich Rameau’s opera scores, we have included a few obligatory character pieces, in particular the tonnerre or thunderstorm and the sommeil or sleep-scene. Each of our suites close with a large-scale Chaconne; the second of these is taken from the last entrée of Les Indes galantes, which is set in our own country of America.

upcoming events

http://music.yale.edu box office 203 432-4158 concerts & media Vincent Oneppo Dana Astmann Monica Ong Reed Danielle Heller Elizabeth Martignetti operations Tara Deming Christopher Melillo piano curators Brian Daley William Harold recording studio Eugene Kimball Jason Robins

November 19 new music new haven 8 pm, Morse Recital Hall, Free Featuring faculty composer Jack Vees and his piece Party Talk. The program also includes music by Chris Cerrone, Jordan Kuspa, Adrian Knight, and Feinan Wang.

November 22 rachel laurin, organ 8 pm, Woolsey Hall, Free Great Organ Music at Yale Music of Ager, Bach, Cabena, Daveluy, Laurin, and an improvisation. Presented by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

December 5 dona nobis pacem 8 pm, Battell Chapel, Free The Yale Camerata, under the direction of Marguerite L. Brooks, performs Haydn’s Paukenmesse, Martinu’s Nonet, and Part I of Mendelssohn’s Christus. Presented by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

December5-6 yale baroque opera project 4 pm, Morse Recital Hall, Free Le tre Stagioni: a pastiche of selections from Handel’s operas and oratorios, directed by Andrew Eggert. Performed by students in mus 222, Performance of Early Opera.

Robert Blocker, Dean