We’re Going Bach…to the Future: Jennifer Koh at the Mansion at Strathmore, November 14, 2012

Jennifer Koh stumbled a bit at the beginning of her concert Wednesday night at the Mansion at Strathmore, playing Bach’s Partita no. 3 for solo violin. Some repeated notes in the opening “Preludio” lacked focus, and the quick-paced counterpoint felt careful rather than nimble. Her sound in high notes was uncomfortably piercing in the small room. The overall sweep of the music occasionally receded under the weight of the myriad details to which Koh had to attend.

That kind of performance is the last thing one would expect from Koh. Her appearances with local orchestras have revealed a player who imagines each note, measure, and melody intensely to create a series of dramatic moments and to link them into a story.

Photo by Fran Kaufman, borrowed from Koh’s Facebook page.

On Thursday, Koh’s storytelling ambition extended to the whole evening. In her “Bach and Beyond” programs, Koh returns to the lodestones of the solo violin repertory, Bach’s three sonatas and three partitas, but also connects them to other works, some of which she has effectively championed before (see this CD for evidence thereof). Later in the concert, Koh said that she had built the program as a journey from light to darkness and, eventually, back into light.

Fortunately, her journey through the third partita got back onto the right path quickly. Given a chance to let a melodic line breathe in the second movement, Koh’s tone became warmer, and her imaginative phrasing and concentration came to the fore. The apex came in the Minuet, where the music seemed to be aloft, particularly when she sustained a double-stop as a tender murmur of sound, a measured but distinct pulse ushering the melody along.

After the bubbly Gigue that closes the partita, Koh began replaying the Preludio, just to hear it again. No, wait – that was actually the beginning of Eugene Ysaye’s sonata for solo violin, Op. 27 No. 2, as I was reminded when the Preludio shattered into a huge dissonance from which emerged everyone’s favorite Romantic obsession, the plainchant Dies Irae. The attacca sequence produced some confusion among the audience, though I think we all eventually figured out that this was not some recently discovered Bach appendix. The constant invocation of the Dies Irae in this sonata, along with the completely relentless minor mode, makes it a major broodfest, but Koh’s ability to make music sound like it’s being created on the spot made for gripping psychological drama even within the grim confines.

The Ysaye, quite forward-looking in its harmonic language, made for a natural transition into three modern pieces. Kaija Saariaho put more kinetic and sensory experiences in her “Nocturne,” in memory of the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, than she did melodic ones, and Koh marshaled the swoops and scrapes into a narrative of exploration, at first tentative, then bolder. Elliott Carter’s “Fantasy — Remembering Roger,” written regarding the composer whose last name was Sessions, was a good way to remember the recently deceased Elliott, a complex, dynamic web of textures and rhythms interrupted occasionally by quiet moments of plain feeling. In “Lachen verlent” (“Laughing Unlearned,” a phrase from Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”), Esa-Pekka Salonen takes an angular ground bass and works up a passionate chaconne; Koh gave a powerful sense of the music itself finding a connection, with the feeling overflowing in the final variations before a tentative coda called into question the earlier resolution.

The chaconne form echoed the last movement of the last piece on the program, the return to Bach in the form of his second partita. Here Koh’s playing was clean and commanding throughout, with the Sarabande flowing like a stream before a fierce Gigue led to the famous Chaconne finale. The Chaconne’s turn toward the light, the unexpected, seemingly miraculous move into the major mode, had to compete on Thursday with a helicopter that kept circling Strathmore as if it was looking for someone who had managed to escape Georgetown Prep just up 355.

Koh appeared unfazed. When the initial tentative major variations turned into something blazing with strength, she showed she had kept some power in reserve for just this moment, and made it a culmination of the program. The final turn back to D minor, normally so cruel, here felt cleansing, a resolution of tension. Only someone with the forethought to design and play an entire program with a journey in mind could have pulled that off, and Jennifer Koh is such a musician. She brings part 2 of “Bach and Beyond” to the Mansion next February 28; put it in your calendars now.

Updated to add Other People’s Perspectives: Joan Reinthaler and Noah Mlotek.

Filling in the Silence: Hesperus at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Washington Early Music Festival, June 30, 2012

What better way to score a silent film about goings-on in medieval France than with medieval music? Even when the film in question, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,“ était fabriqué aux Étas-Unis from a source novel written with no obvious concern for historical fact other than that there was a big church named Notre-Dame in Paris at the time.

Hesperus, a powerhouse on the local and national early-music scene, played a medieval soundtrack for the film on Saturday night to close out this year’s Washington Early Music Festival, and their performance — colorful, concentrated, and spontaneous — made it nearly impossible to actually take the movie seriously. The silent-film aesthetic is an acquired one, and Saturday night reminded me that I have not acquired it. The limitiations of the medium lead in Wallace Worsley’s “Hunchback” to exaggeration along every possible axis, from facial expressions to body language to emotions in general. Also, the audiences of the past apparently had a limitless tolerance for watching Lon Chaney as the Hunchback grabbing a rope and ringing a bell. I get that he has great enthusiasm for this task, which is why it could have been filmed from more than one angle, rather than simply replaying the same footage every time.

The movie was not as entertaining as this poster, which must have disappointed many people in 1923. From Wikipedia, saver of souls.

Such artifice made a striking contrast with the music Chancey, Priscilla Smith, and Rosa Lamoreaux sang and played. They effortlessly conjured serenity, rambunctiousness, tension, officiousness, and even (especially) romance. Only a few times, for fractions of a second, did the music and images not match; normally, the music was so well-chosen to seem an integral part of the scene, like a dancing tune to lead a festival of peasants, or a crusty woodwind proclamation to usher in a nobleperson.

The movie gets better when it begins rushing towards its surprisingly intense climax, but here it was difficult to separate the pathos of the Hunchback as he enjoys a glimmer of sympathetic human contact from the pathos generated by this trio of musicians, especially when the texture thinned out and Chancey was left alone to limn a few final notes as the priest (SPOILER ALERT) laid the Hunchback to rest.

The trio kept it up for 100 straight minutes, too — no intermissions here. Smith handled 99 percent of the wind-instrument work, with a full set of recorders as well as a shawm, early bagpipe, and crumhorn, and I saw her shaking her right hand out a few times towards the end of the film, trying to keep it from going stiff. Her playing showed no signs of fatigue, and she expertly matched the timbres of her instruments to the onscreen action, varying her sound and approach. Smith even sang soprano in a few two-voice pieces and didn’t sound totally out of her league next to her fellow soprano Lamoreaux, who is pretty much the early-music singin’ queen of the DMV.

Lamoreaux handled the lead vocals, obviously, and her pure, even voice blended so well with Smith’s recorders that sometimes it was hard to tell which line was which. Lamoreaux also had the lead on percussion, and particularly the difficult job of syncing her bells with the carillioneurship on screen. Chancey played not only the vielle but also several other stringed instruments, also varying her instrumentation to keep the sound lively and using effects to make the movie come alive. (If you’re intrigued, Chancey, Lamoreaux, and two other people will be doing the medieval-scoring thing to “Robin Hood” in B-more at An Die Musik on Friday.)

As noted, the concert closed this year’s Washington Early Music Festival, and during the (enthusiastic) applause, Chancey asked that we direct some of our approbation to Constance Whiteside, the festival’s artistic director and prime mover. Saturday’s concert drew the biggest crowd of the three concerts I attended; fittingly, it took place at St. Mark’s, the church that has been the center of the festival since it began in 2004. While Hesperus had a unique contribution, their concert sat squarely in the larger WEMF tradition of presenting little-known music with enthusiastic, committed performers at reasonable prices. The WEMF is a summertime oasis from the fall-to-summer run of the standard rep played by the standard people. I hope it keeps going strong in the years to come.

Other People’s Perspectives: Anne Midgette. I swear I was not stalking Anne this past weekend.

45-Minute Workout: National Orchestral Institute and Festival’s “New Lights” Chamber Concert, University of Maryland, June 28, 2012

On Thursday, the National Orchestral Institute‘s New Lights chamber concert started before the music itself did. Just as the student-musicians on stage had finished tuning, other young folk (later revealed to be fellow NOIers) streamed into the Gildenhorn Recital Hall, sorting themselves into pairs that each clapped in a different rhythm and encouraged the audience to join in. The program revealed that these rhythms came from Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto, the first movement of which we were about to hear, but even with foreknowledge the clapping struck a spark: Yes, this is really happening at a classical music concert.

The New Lights concerts have always sought to surprise, with modern repertoire played with committment and skill and presented in ways that are unusual but perhaps shouldn’t be. On Thursday, we heard music without pause for three-quarters of an hour, textures and idioms varied widely around a focal point, Paul Moravec‘s Brandenburg Gate, a chamber concerto commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra as a response to the very same Brandenburg No. 2 of Johann Sebastian.

Paul Moravec watched the whole concert from a box and said at the end that this concert was “one of the coolest things I’ve ever been involved in.” Photo from his website.

From a vigorous performance of the Baroque selection, the concert slid — literally, via glissando — into a movement from a John Cage string quartet, played by students in the upstairs box seats, with the lights dimmed. Cage’s strategically noncommittal scrapes, extra-tentative here, yielded to the similarly spare but more expressive “Spiegel im Spiegel” (“Mirror in Mirror”) of Arvo Pärt, where those musicians still on the stage traded off with those in the boxes. A piano in a box close to the stage played relentless triadic arpeggios in the Pärtian bell-like style and served as a kind of fulcrum between the two groups.

Everyone got to join in on a chanting improvisation, which started with a NOIers singing whatever notes they wanted. The program encouraged us to chime in with whatever tones sounded good to us and hold them until you felt like dropping them. I sang at a low voice so I could hear the outlines of the massive chord shift and pulse, which was totally fascinating. I would do this again in virtually any group I could get to to do it. (Staff meeting ahoy!)

The cloud of sound started breaking when the NOIers began playing motives from the Moravec, eventually launching into its onrushing, clarifying energy and relentless minor seconds (in the form of “B-A-C-H”). The ripenio group of flute Mark Huskey, clarinet Jen Augello, trumpet Anthony DiMauro, and violin Kenneth Liao commanded attention at the center, playing with assurance and brio. The orchestra played a dense score with remarkably unanimity of expression, earning post-concert plaudits from the composer himself.

The Cage and Pärt performances didn’t quite get to that level, and while the program traced a clear path from piece to piece, it remains unclear to me exactly what the non-Bach works actually had to do with the Moravec. (Also still baffling is the program’s description of the substitution of a vibraphone for the trumpet in the Bach as “clever,” when clearly a trumpet was available and when the orchestra frequently had to drop its volume so the vibraphone could be, you know, heard. In general, another read-through on the program would have been a good idea.) But the format of the program kept the sense of adventure alive throughout — never a slack moment in which quotidian thoughts could intrude — and the modest length left me hungry for more.

The University of Maryland brings all these young people to the NOI because it’s just fun to have talented youths hanging out with each other, but also to help them shape their careers, meaning that they may just represent the Future of Music. If it means more concerts where musicians actively engage the audience, think of novel ways to present music, and tread boldly into modern repertoire with instant appeal, bring on the future.

Other People’s Perspectives: Anne Midgette. (No, the concert did not take place at Strathmore. Blasted headline writers. I still cringe when remembering this doozy.) Updated to add: Charles T. Downey.

High Fasch-in’: Fasch and Friends at All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church, Washington Early Music Festival, June 19, 2012

For me, a complete Washington Early Music Festival experience includes a midweek concert at which I don’t know what to expect. The concert by Fasch and Friends on Tuesday at the All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church fit that bill: Johann Friederich Fasch is a fairly obscure German Baroque composer, and potentially his friends would be even more obscure. Plus the program had a unifying and alliterative theme, “The Many Moods of the Minor Mode,” in which the Fasch-ists (too much?) would refute the modern idea that minor key => sad by exploring the different characters of the minor mode in the Baroque. Sold!

I sent Fasch a friend request when I got home. He has not yet responded.

On Tuesday, the super Friends did best championing Fasch and (as hoped) two little-known contemporaries. The group’s namesake was represented by one of his quartet sonatas, which as you might guess had one more melodic part than a trio sonata. In this case, two oboes, played by Sarah Weiner and guest Meg Owens, and William Sherfey’s bassoon joined the continuo, composed of Thomas MacCracken on harpsichord  and Yayoi Barrack on viola da gamba. In this D minor quartet, Fasch played around with the distribution of the melodic material among the three soloists; sometimes the bassoon would dialogue with the oboes playing in unison, and sometimes the oboes would chatter between themselves as the bassoon provided support. With Sherfey sitting across from Weiner and Owens, the dialogic effect came across nicely, and the melodies sounded fresh as a consequence.

A trio in G minor by Georg Philip Telemann for two recorders (Weiner and Sherfey, in another of their many roles on Tuesday) and continuo received another affectionate, stylish performance. But when Weiner took up the oboe for another Telemann trio (this one in A minor) that also featured Sherfey’s recorder, Weiner had trouble compassing the more virtuosic flourishes, starting slightly late and then rushing through to keep up. Barrack had trouble getting her melodies lined up correctly and intoned properly in her solo number, which came in a reconstruction of a trio in E minor by some guy named Johann Sebastian Bach, though as a continuo player she provided strong support in the rest of the concert.

Passing through all the common Baroque minor keys, one could draw few broad conclusions about their various characters; as MacCracken noted, a single minor key can sound very different even within a work. But the various ways a minor key can sound — melancholy, energetic, stately, tranquil — certainly came across, and the minor mode never became monotonous. The diversity of instrumentation helped, and the most notable diversity came in a trio for three recorders and nothin’ else by the Baroque composer and theorist Johann Mattheson. (For those of us who enjoy attempting to pronounce German names in an exaggerated fashion, this concert was pure gold.) Here Weiner, Sherfey, and MacCracken teamed up without the support of basso continuo and kept the music aloft with sparkling interplay, especially in a Gigue finale that induced my foot to tap.

All Souls Church is a handsome space but not the best concert venue; a bird chirped from somewhere in the rafters for the entire evening (though the winds of the Fascians were louder, thank goodness), and the HVAC system apparently would have drowned out the performers, meaning we did not have air conditioning on Tuesday night, which made the church as stifling as you would imagine. Still, a quartet by Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, featuring the most interesting of all the instrumental combinations on Tuesday’s program — flute, oboe, viola, and basso continuo — made it worthwhile to sweat it out until the end of the concert. (The WEMF program makes a very handy fan.)

To play it, Sherfey switched to the harpsichord, MacCracken manned the baroque flute, guest Leslie Nero handled the viola, and Weiner stayed fast on the oboe. After a concertful of sturdy harpsichording, MacCracken made the flute dance nimbly with the other instruments, Nero tossed off her lines with her usual élan, Weiner helped the unusual texture come together, and Sherfey and Barrack anchored the whole thing. I can’t say I had ever heard the name Johann Gottlieb Janitsch before Fasch and Friends introduced his music to me, but I’ll remember this performance — just what you’re looking for when you don’t know what to expect.

I AM NOT MATURE

This is what I thought of when I first read the group name “Fasch and Friends.”

Also, when MacCracken announced that he was grateful for Sherfey agreeing to play the concert even though it was his birthday, I was hoping that the other instrumentalists would play “Happy Birthday” and MacCracken would get us all to sing. Either that or 50′s “In Da Club.” Maybe Sherfey was sad because he apparently does not have a decent bio page on the Internet that I can link to in this review.

From the New World: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s “Star-Spangled Symphony” at Meyerhoff, June 17, 2012

Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” has bellowed out from every Fourth of July concert an American symphony orchestra has ever given (give or take), despite the fact that it depicts events that did not involve us in any way, specifically the Russian campaign against the man so complex he had a complex named after him. Perhaps our collective embrace of this overlong, hamfisted hodgepodge of themes designed to fire up Russians — who, despite their many virtues, are not Americans ­— is a testament to our national melting pot, in which distinctive characteristics of other people can become part of our common heritage if we say so. Or perhaps, in this age of small arms and laser-guided bombs, we just really like our cannon fire and will take it any way we can get it.

For years I have wished that an enterprising American composer who enjoys royalty checks would write an anthem as rousing, and perhaps of higher quality (Note: not essential), that would specifically celebrate the U.S. of A. and thus supplant “1812″ in the national imagination. Was I ever surprised to learn that none other than Philip Glass, master of darkly murmuring ostinatos, had taken up his pen in response to a co-commission by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to write an “Overture for 2012″ to commemorate this continent’s War of 1812. Could the B-more native marshal his resources and knock Tchaikovsky from his unlikely perch atop the patriotic pops?

Philip Philip Philip Glass Glass Glass. Photo from his website.

The BSO premiered “Overture for 2012,” under its music director (and Glass devotee) Marin Alsop, on Sunday night in Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. (The Torontonians premiered it simultaneously in wherever they play.) In Baltimore, the “Sailabration” was in full swing, featuring not only tall ships docked in the deep waters of Baltimore’s harbor but also an air show from the Blue Angels. My concertgoing companion and I wandered around the Inner Harbor for most of the afternoon, boarding foreign vessels and occasionally, cued by a sky-rending roar, looking up to glimpse a plane buzzing the skyline. The concert-opening Star-Spangled Banner, which inspired large chunks of the audience to actually sing, further primed the pump for patriotism.

“Overture for 2012″ opens with brass fanfare and percussion, martial in timbre and dense with notes, but both repeat until you notice they aren’t really going anywhere, at least how you’d expect them to in (say) Tchaikovsky. The basic materials of patriotic music, it turns out, fit into Glass’ compositional schema pretty well — both the fanfare and the rhythmic pattern are memorable and full enough of import that you’re willing to listen as they undergo subtle changes, like the image in a kaleidoscope changing as you slowly twist the dial. At one point the music pulses in a kind of Wagnerian bitonality, flashing major and minor without committing to either. Glass introduces another fanfare to push the music to a close, falling and then rising to come back to start, either an ironic comment on the “Up and at ‘em!” character of most fanfares or just something that sounded cool and could further develop the material. Yes, for this occasion Philip Glass composed a work that sounded like about 20 percent John Philip Sousa and 80 percent Glass.

When it was over, I told my concertgoing companion through the din of applause, “Again! I want to hear it again right now!” Still, it’ll take something more blatantly pander-y to supplant Tchaikovsky — the “Bald Eagle Overture” on patriotic themes, featuring lots and lots of cannons, perhaps. But to commemorate a war that the United States only sort of won, a spot of bitonality and some ambivalent fanfares seem exactly the way to go.

The remainder of the program provided a mix of Maryland-centric and United States-centric music that I personally enjoyed even as I noted its flaws. In its non-Glass orchestral selections, the BSO sounded woefully under-rehearsed, making a particularly notable hash of the “Hoe-Down” from Aaron Copland’s score for “Rodeo.” The U.S. Navy Sea Chanters Chorus, as always, looked sparkling and sang characterfully, but they needed microphones to be heard in the hall, and there was a lot of trouble getting the mix right, especially when they sang with the orchestra. Maryland’s governor Martin O’Malley showed up with his band, O’Malley’s March, to sing three songs lauding Baltimore, a noble agenda marred in execution by ear-splittingly loud amplification; the violins of BSO, playing behind the band, might as well have been miming. The concert was apparently being taped for Maryland Public Television, and I assume they’ll fix the mix in post-production.

Fortunately, Alsop, the Navy singers, and the BSO had a trick up their sleeves for the program’s close: a drastically abbreviated version of the “1812 Overture,” using the version prepared by Igor Buketoff in which the hymns that Tchaikovsky outlined orchestrally are actually sung, so everyone can tell that the music is straight outta Russia. Then, as the final prerecorded cannon sound effects fired through the speakers, a pop from above, and confetti fluttered down from the ceiling of the Meyerhoff. It was still raining paper as Alsop and the orchestra took their bows, and as she left the stage, Alsop took a couple quick steps and stooped to grab a piece of confetti, smiling all the while. Apart from the Glass, which as noted I would like to hear again, this concert could well be summed up by that gesture: messy, but fun.

Other People’s Perspectives: Tim Smith. And some more thoughts from Tim Smith on the Glass here. Anne Midgette had a nice preview of the Glass in Sunday’s Post.

Playing with Fire: National Festival Orchestra at the University of Maryland, June 16, 2012

From the opening bars of Leopold Stokowski’s transcription of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor for organ, it was clear: Leonard Slatkin had the National Orchestral Institute‘s National Festival Orchestra playing extremely well. As noted previously on this blog appliance, the NOI brings talented young musicians to the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for a month of high-level instrumental tutelage, leading to four Saturdays of orchestral concerts and some other fun sprinkled throughout the month of June. In years past, the students came together to form the NOI Philharmonic, which is now called the National Festival Orchestra for some reason.

In years past, imperfect string ensemble has been a reliable telltale that they do not play together all the time. Under Slatkin’s baton, though, the lower strings united impressively to state the passacaglia theme, and more impressively they maintained their concentration as they played it over and over and over again until Stokowski’s transcription finally handed it to the brass. Especially in this transcription, the passacaglia and fugue burns slow, and Slatkin kept it on a long trajectory, the violin figurations steadily becoming busier and then approaching a frenzy, until the final moments of the fugue, when the French horns came in blasting the subject like a howitzer.

Leonard Slatkin conducting some other kids, at Interlochen. From his website.

Only the winds failed to impress in the Bach/Stokowski, sounding a bit lost in the counterpoint, but they sounded great in Cindy McTee‘s “Double Play,” next on the program and (exciting!) a DMV premiere. As was his custom when leading new works as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra a few Metro stops south, Slatkin said a few words before the piece but disclosed little that wasn’t already in the program notes. My considered opinion is that if you think a preconcert talk is necessary, you should prepare some excerpts so the audience has some idea what you’re talking about when you discuss the music. To do otherwise accomplishes little.

This lack of new info frustrated especially given that Slatkin and McTee are married, though he did note that “royalties stay in the family.” The performance put his wife’s work in a good light. (Slatkin also led the work’s world premiere with his new band, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, in 2010.) McTee packed the piece full of gorgeous textures, like in the opening section, “The Unquestioned Answer,” where percussion dappled the sweet, quiet chords in the strings and winds like stars reflected in the lapping tides, pulsing with quiet energy. The “Tempus Fugit” second section, tinged with jazzy harmonies; skittered and wheeled about with great nervous energy that often expressed itself in dueling rhythms. Even though McTee says the two sections can be performed separately, my favorite thing in the whole piece was the transition, with the percussion striking a rhythm against indifferent strings, like a match trying to ignite. Slatkin kept it all humming along. Though McTee did not approach the cosmic wonder of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” whose title and musical materials the first section messed around with, the work was still a ton of fun.

I am sure it was just a coincidence that Slatkin led Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony with the NFO of the NOI a week after his old band played it under their new music director, Christoph Eschenbach. (No, really, I am. Why is my lack of sarcasm not coming across in type?) Anyway, the NFO sounded least professional in this warhorse of a symphony, in both bad and good ways. The orchestra got out of sync in some busy passages, climaxes occasionally sounded more loud than clear, and some of the soloists had trouble keeping their lines going, most notably the horn’s heartbreaking hiccup in the gorgeous melody that begins this symphony’s slow movement.

But a shocking enthusiasm also animated this performance; nothing about it sounded jaded. Those cacophonous climaxes erupted from the music, pinning me back in my seat, especially when contrasting with the more tender music in the slow movement. Desperation and triumph alternated and shot through the finale, the NFO keenly feeling the impact of each different riff on the speedy journey. And there was some fine orchestral playing, particularly when Slatkin and his charges successfully executed some tricky tempo changes, as in a stop-you-dead brusque acceleration during the first movement’s coda.

That moment felt like a rebuke to any hope that had been offered by previous modulations to the major mode, and at that point in the performance I wasn’t thinking about how well Slatkin or the orchestra were doing; I just felt a keen disappointment, straight from the drama of the music. That kind of immediacy, born of freshness and passion, distinguishes NOI performances year after year. It was great to hear it again on Saturday night.

Other People’s Perspectives: Robert Battey.

BREAKFAST AT THE SLATKIN/MCTEE HOUSEHOLD (an imagined dialogue)

“Honey, did you really have to start the diminuendo so early last night?”
“That’s how it is in the score.”
“But you know the score is only a guide for the realization of a performance. In the moment, I didn’t want the diminuendo to begin then.”
“You should probably revise the score. I’ll make a note.”
“But maybe tomorrow the diminuendo will need to begin then. The hall might feel more intimate. You have to feel it and see when it’s going to begin.”
“I have a limited amount of control over these musicians anyway. If they want to play softer they’re going to play softer. If I want them to play some way outside the score, I need to tell them to do that before we perform.”
“Fine.”
<pause>
“Could you go take the trash out?”

Equal to the Task: Les Inégales at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Washington Early Music Festival, June 9, 2012

Two members of Les Inégales came down from the Northeast to the Washington Early Music Festival on Saturday night, bringing along contralto Imelda Franklin Bogue and viola da gamba player Anne Legêne for a program titled “Lover’s Quarrels” at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington. The ensemble selected movements from instrumental works to introduce four vocal laments of tempestuous love, thus ensuring that one’s ears did not tire of any one combination of sounds or compositional style, and packed a whole lot of musical incident into 75 intermissionless minutes.

Les Inégales, trading notes. From their Facebook page.

Both of the Inégalistes shone Saturday. Christine Gevert had the advantage of a fantastic harpsichord, sonorous yet tangy with overtones; the church’s diffuse acoustic blunted its twang a bit but could not disguise the incisiveness of her playing. Gevert drove Giovanni Felice Sances’ cantata “Usupator tiranno” forward at an implacable rhythm, mimicking the lover’s thought process and emphasizing the arresting dramatic turn when the rhythm suddenly shifted on the phrase “If you didn’t love me I wouldn’t adore you.” Gevert had the measure of more subtle accompaniment as well, imaginatively voicing her chords and keeping the rhythms light and springy. In her one solo piece, Michelangelo Rossi’s “Settima Toccata,” Gevert relished the free rhythms and the daring harmonies, piling up dissonances and chromatic runs towards the end of the piece like waves crashing on a shore.

St. George’s made Rodrigo Tarraza’s Baroque traverse flutes sound even cooler than normal; in quiet moments, the sound hung in the air like a spectre, making his playing in Francois Couperin’s “The Nightingale of Love” even more evocative. Tarraza carefully shaped the bird-inspired melodies, sounding completely different from the guy who so aggressively ornamented the Preludio movement from Arcangelo Corelli’s Sonata in E minor (Op. 5, No. 8) that it earned him an appreciative, raised eyebrow from Legêne. Throughout the concert, he seemed to relish whatever style he was asked to essay; my favorite was his rendition of Pietro Antonio Locatelli’s Sonata IV in G Major, Op. 2, full of daredevil runs yet always graceful in the melodies.

While Legêne held down her end of the continuo with a nice firm tone, she didn’t show quite as much individuality as Gevert and Tarraza. When she had the spotlight in Marin Marais’ Suite in A minor, the melodies never quite took flight, and in Jean-Marie Leclair’s Trio Sonata Op. 2, No. 8, which gives the gamba and flute equal melodic prominence, Tarraza’s flute made the gamba recede from the picture a little.

Bogue’s first couple songs sounded like a stream of vowels, as the church swallowed up her consonant sounds. It is a tribute to the songs themselves and Bogue’s sharp characterizations thereof that these performances still commanded attention. Bogue corrected the problem in her performance of “Dolce pur d’amor l’affanno,” an Italian cantata by George Frideric Handel (the most famous composer on the program by far), setting the stage for Handel’s “Mi palpita il cor”: the concert’s finale, its longest work, and the first piece on Saturday to feature all four musicians at once.

Here the group exploded into the opening section, whose one line of text translates as “My heart throbs, and I do not understand why,” with Gevert and Legêne attacking hard and Bogue soaring and swooping in a musical statement all the more powerful for its concision. When Handel gave them a whole aria and allowed Tarraza to join the fun, the passion became less concentrated but more richly detailed and expressive, Bogue lamenting in luminous voice above keen playing from the three instrumentalists. A fierce following recitative led to an even more expressive closing aria, contrasting the hope of contentment in love with the turmoil that had preceded it.

This climactic performance, not to mention all the well-chosen, expertly sequenced music that preceded it, fit perfectly this year’s WEMF theme, “Vices & Virtues — Passionate Music of Early Europe.” It also led to an unusual amount of applause from a grateful audience, one of whose members was moved to stand up and urge his cohort to bring someone folks half their age to the next festival concert they attended, to ensure the future of classical music. (Or something like that; I didn’t write it down.) I don’t know whether mere exposure can produce an affinity for this music, but a concert like the one Les Inégales presented Saturday would be the thing to do it.

GO TO SOME MORE WASHINGTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL CONCERTS

It’s a nice laid-back atmosphere, in a neighborhood church somewhere near a Metro station, with people who really enjoy music both onstage and in the audience. You don’t have to dress up or know much about what you’re hearing — most of the audience hasn’t heard anything in these concerts before. Actually, they would be pretty awesome concerts to drag young people to, although I was probably half that dude’s age so who knows. Anyway, I cannot stress enough how much I look forward to WEMF concerts.