Concerti Grossi of the Baroque

Concerti Grossi of the

baroque sunday, may 3 2009 performed by Students from Music 626/227: Rhetoric and Early Instrumental Performance Robert Mealy, Director music of Vivaldi Handel Bach

Robert Blocker, Dean

may 3, 2009 · sunday · 4 pm Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall Concerti Grossi of the BAROQUE Robert Mealy, Director Antonio Vivaldi 1678–1741

Sinfonia from L’Olimpiade Allegro Andante Allegro

George Frideric Handel 1685–1759

Concerto Grosso in B-flat major, Op. 3, No. 2 Vivace Largo Allegro (Minuet) (Allegro)

Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750

Sinfonia to Cantata 42, “Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats”

George Frideric Handel

Suite in G major, HWV 350 from Water Music Minuet Rigaudons I & II Menuets I & II Gigue I & II

George Frideric Handel

Suite in F major, HWV 348 from Water Music Ouverture (Largo-Allegro) Adagio e staccato Allegro – Andante – Allegro Minuet I & II Air Bourrée Hornpipe [Andante] Minuet

As a courtesy to the performers and audience members, turn off cell phones and pagers. Please do not leave the theater during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is not permitted.

Concerti Grossi of the BAROQUE Performers

Students of Music 626 / 227: Rhetoric and Early Instrumental Performance

violins Robert Mealy, director Alexander Woods* Michelle Abraham Qi Cao Benjamin Charmot Ruby Ying-Ju Chen Nicholas DiEugenio Yu-Ting Huang Katherine Hyun Sunhee Jeon Jane Kim Naria Kim Daniel Lee** Joshua Peckins Aditi Ramakrishnan David Southorn Sae-Rom Yoo violas Min Jeong Cha Hyun-Jung Lee Mathilde Geismar Roussel

cellos Ezra Seltzer * Hannah Collins Sofia Solomon Joann Whang double bass Patrick O'Connell Wen Yang flute Yoobin Son oboe Merideth Hite Jennifer Shark bassoon Ellen Connors natural horn Tianxia Wu Leelanee Sterrett** harpsichord Avi Stein*

* Yale Baroque Ensemble member ** Special guest

Concerti Grossi of the BAROQUE Program Notes

George Frideric Handel Âť

Our concert this afternoon is a product of a semester-long investigation into the Italian baroque style that swept Europe in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Where the first semester of Music 626 / 227 explored the elegant and highly stylized dance forms of the French baroque, and their influence on the music of composers like Telemann and Bach, this semester was devoted to the sonata and concerto forms popularized by Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi, a vibrant musical language that took Europe by storm.

compositional energy; its three-movement form looks forward to the sinfonia's later incarnation as an independent concert piece, and is the first glimmer of what will later turn into the massive symphonic forms of the Classic period.

Handel's Opus 3 concerti grossi were collected together by his publisher, John Walsh, in 1735.

They incorporate a wide variety of Handel's earlier music, and were gathered together without Handel's supervision - and published without his permission! The second concerto in Walsh's set has a particularly varied scoring, featuring We open with the overture to Vivaldi's 1734 everything from two violins energetically traopera L'Olimpiade. While Vivaldi is best known ding sixteenth-note runs in the first movement today for his brilliant concertos, he invested a to a sublime oboe solo in the second, accomgreat deal of his career in writing for the flour- panied by a lyrical duet from two solo cellos. ishing opera scene of Venice. The explosive opening of this sinfonia is a tribute to his Bach's surviving orchestral output is relatively

Concerti Grossi of the BAROQUE Program Notes small: a few orchestral suites and a number of concertos are all that have come down to us.

The Bach scholar Christoph Wolff estimates that as many as 350 works from Bach's Cöthen years alone have vanished. And some orchestral works remain hidden still to this day, disguised as sinfonias in his cantatas. One wonderful concerto grosso serves as the introduction to BWV 42, a cantata that concerns itself with the meeting on the road to Emmaus, where Jesus manifested himself to some of his disciples after his death. The twilight mood of this story may be reflected in the gentle scoring of the sinfonia, which is a kind of seventh Brandenburg Concerto: the two oboes and bassoon take the role of the concertino soloists here.

Today's concert is the culmination of a semester of work for the students of Music 626 / 227.

This course is designed to be a hands-on introduction to historical performance practice, using the Yale Collegium's fine set of baroque bows for the string players. Working through the music you hear today, we discussed questions of eighteenth-century technique, explored various approaches to style and ornamentation, and tried to find how best to bring this music to vivid life again, taking as our approach eighteenthcentury ideas of music as rhetorical oration – that is, as impassioned, moving speech. We hope you enjoy the results as much as we have enjoyed the process. It has been a great pleasure to explore this wonderful repertoire with such remarkable players.

Our program ends with two-thirds of Handel's "Celebrated Water Musick," as a contemporary – Robert Mealy publication describes it. The Prussian ambassador in London gave a detailed account of the 1717 royal "party on the water" where this music was first heard: "About eight in the evening the King repaired to his barge... Next to the King's barge was that of the musicians, about 50 in number, who played on all kinds of instruments, to wit trumpets, horns, hautboys, bassoons, German flutes, French flutes, violins, and basses... His Majesty approved of the music so greatly that he caused it to be repeated three times in all."

The movements of the Water Music are generally grouped by key, in three different suites: the two we hear today are the gentle G major suite for flute and strings, which includes a number of elegant dance movements, and the splendid F major suite featuring two horns, played today on two natural horns from Prof.

William Purvis' studio. This was in fact one of the first appearances of horns in an English orchestra – and in our performance it is possibly their first appearance as part of an orchestra on the stage of Sprague.

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concerts & media Vincent Oneppo Director Dana Astmann Assistant Director Monica Ong Design Manager Tara Deming Operations Manager Christopher Melillo Operations Coordinator Danielle Heller Box Office Coordinator Kelly Yamaguchi-Scanlon Accomodations & Travel Brian Daley Piano Curator William Harold Piano Curator

recording studio Eugene Kimball Director / Recording Engineer Jason Robins Assistant Recording Engineer

May 22 yale symphony orchestra commencement concert 6:00 pm, Battell Chapel Toshiyuki Shimada, music director. Free.

May 23 yale glee club commencement concert 8:00 pm, Sprague Hall Jeffrey Douma, conductor. Works by Guerrero, Grieg, P채rt, Rachmaninoff, and Rorem, as well as traditional Yale songs.

Tickets required. Call 203.432.4136

May 24 yale school of music commencement concert 4:00 pm, Sprague Hall Featuring outstanding performers from the class of 2009.

May 24 yale band twilight concert 7:00 pm, Old Campus The Yale Concert Band performs a twilight commencement concert.

Thomas C. Duffy, director.