Fiesta! Bach Sinfonia at Montgomery College’s Cultural Arts Center in Silver Spring, May 5, 2013

On Cinco de Mayo, the always-enterprising Bach Sinfonia was the only source in town for Mexican classical music, presented as part of a fun program spanning Ye Olde Latin America and titled “¡Nuevo Mundo Barocco!”

It turns out that not only did Latin Americans write a lot of music during the colonial period, much of it has gone undiscovered until quite recently. Intrepid scholars have plumbed the archives of the churches and abbeys established throughout the Spanish New World, and they’ve come up with some gems that mix the musical language of the old church with (as one might expect from a group of proselytizers) the vernacular forms and rhythms of the locals.

Under conductor and artistic director Daniel Abraham, the Bach Sinfonia always has a sure feel for rhythm: how it underpins a slow melodic line, organizes a fast allegro, establishes a kind of loom on which fantastic counterpoint can be woven. In this music, where such an understanding is even more important than in the European Baroque, that ability made for some really fun performances, where difficult rhythms came off with flair and difficult singing always felt exuberant.

The latter virtue shone in the first pieces the program, two pieces by Francisco López Capillas in a high-Renaissance style but with just the slightest hint of additional rhythmic impetus, sounding silky as sung by the eight-voice choir. They kept the fine sound in “Vayan unas especies,” a piece by Cuban composer Esteban Salas, whose rowdy rhythms made a joyful noise unto the newborn Christ. Abraham sounded taken with Salas, saying the Sinfonia was ready to read through his other works, and no wonder; Salas seemed to find new ways to make melodies within the Baroque context, and his harmonic invention matched his rhythmic drive. He’s a find.

Guest guitarist Richard Savino normally rolls with (among others) his own Latin America-focused chamber group, El Mundo. On Sunday he joined the stalwart Sinfonia continuo — Joseph Gascho, harpsichord; Douglas Poplin, ‘cello; and Robbie Link, violone — and added color and depth with his several strings, plus a deep understanding of this repertoire. (Not for nothing did he participate with Abraham in the pre-concert discussion!) He also played a couple pieces in the improvisatory tradition to begin the second half of the program, demonstrating the range of color his guitar could produce when solo.

Richard Savino, looking like a million bucks with Joyce DiDonato. Obviously this was the best picture of him on the Internet.

Unlike Savino, soprano soloist Jennifer Ellis Kampani‘s contributions were front and center whenenver she was on stage. I am on record with my admiration for her singing, which combines thrilling sustained notes, pure and accurate, with vocal agility all the way up and down the scale and admirable diction. Here she got to be a little more demonstrative than in (say) a Bach cantata, and she enjoyed the opportunity, tweaking the chorus of Juan de Araujo’s “Los coflades de la estleya” subtly each time she sang it to wring out a new dimension of excitement and joy, or snapping her neck back and forth to emphasize the rhythms of Antonio de Salazar’s “Tarara tarara qui yo soy Antonyio.”

Jennifer Ellis Kampani, from her website. By Kenny Trice.

You always get the sense that Kampani has a tremendous amount of fun when she sings, and never was that impression stronger than the finale of this concert, when we got another Christmas song, this one by Mexican composer Juan García de Zespedes and packed with ecstatic exclamations and hard-driving rhythms. Michelle Humphreys, who did excellent work all afternoon on percussion, played a commanding solo with every resource available to her (including bells strapped to her ankle), Kampani and the chorus threw themselves into all the “Ay!”s, and the instrumentalists matched them in exuberance and precision. Let’s hope scholars can give the Bach Sinfonia lots more of this stuff to perform, even if they have to do it on a day other than May 5th.

A THING I LIKED AND A THING I DIDN’T LIKE

Liked: As someone who has attended (for example) a concert of Estonian choral music on St. Patrick’s Day, I found it refreshing that this concert, although it featured music around 300 years old, actually referred to something happening in the world today.

Didn’t Like: The translations of these texts in the program made me wonder why they bothered to have translations at all. Here’s one stanza from Salas’ piece:

If that is the tinted Carnation
that gives new giving magic:
ours is to make disciplined a
foreign offence.

It’s like someone put the texts into Google Translate and cut and pasted the results directly into the program.

Leipzig Idol: The Bach Sinfonia at Montgomery College’s Cultural Arts Center in Silver Spring, March 31, 2012

On Saturday night, the Bach Sinfonia performed works by Christoph Graupner, Georg Friedrich Kauffmann, and their namesake Johann Sebastian Bach, all candiates for the job of Kantor of Leipzig in 1722-23, thus documenting an instant in history that proved to be quite musically significant. But then the Sinfonia took it further, procuring electronic devices from Turning Technologies that allowed the audience to instantly vote on each of the works, effectively turning the audience into a modern-day Leipzig town council. At the end of the evening, the scores were tallied, and the new Kantor of Leipzig was…Georg Kauffmann.

That’s not how it happened in real life, of course; Bach became Kantor and stayed in Leipzig for the rest of his life. But I credit the Bach Sinfonia for being willing to let the audience give its opinion. Typically, classical performers determine what’s good, tell you why it’s good, and then play it for you. Here artistic director, conductor, and program note writer Daniel Abraham specifically refrained from saying anything about the relative quality of the works, trusting that the audience would enjoy judging for themselves.

For me, the lesson of the program was: Bach-ing ain’t easy. The program opened with BWV 22, Bach’s “Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe,” and it sounded like, well, another Bach cantata. I mean, they’re really good, but there are over 200 of them, and sometimes they sound a lot alike to modern ears. When Bach returned to close the program, though, with BWV 23 (“Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn”), the difference between JSB and lesser Baroque lights became clear: He had a more interesting, less static mix of harmonies; his writing fit the voice more gracefully; he knew how to bring a melody, and a movement, to a close at just the right time.

Bach also just plain had more arrows in his compositional quiver than Graupner, who after three pieces had worn out my ears. I enjoyed CG’s setting of the “Magnificat,” which breaks up the text into short, sharply characterized movements, punches those movements up with trumpets and timpani, and closes on a fugue whose creaky but earnest counterpoint I found irresistible. In “Aus der Tefen rufen wir,” though, Graupner kept bringing back mediocre music for no obvious liturgical or musical reason, and his “Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden” just dragged on and on and on, to the point where I wondered whether certain arias were ever going to end. The latter cantata also showed the limitations of Graupner’s writing for the voice; alto Charles Humphries, who otherwise handled his duties with no trouble on Saturday, had to repeatedly tense himself and rock upward in an extremely uncomfortable-looking manner to get through the aria “Ein Christ, der Christum liebet.” Tenor Craig Lemming had trouble pronouncing the big German consonant combos in “Gleich wie die Waage wanker,” which I also blame on Graupner for not letting said combos lie on the melody in pronounceable ways.

Graupner also had the most punchable face of the three composers whose work was performed Saturday.

As for Kauffmann, I gave his “Die Liebe Gottess ist augegossen in unsere Herzen” (which received its North American premiere on Saturday!) a low rating because he used a little alternating-note figure to bring all his melodies to a close, which eventually sounded like some kind of tic. The audience didn’t agree with me, giving him a mean of 7.79, which narrowly bested Bach’s two-cantata mean of 7.72. However, BWV 22 garnered a 7.35, while the concert-closing BWV 23 rated an 8.09; perhaps the intervening pieces made others think, “Hey, there might be something to this Bach guy being considered a great composer after all.” It appeared that other people also got a bit tired of Graupner, since his per-piece means dropped from 7.87 to 7.61 and finally to 7.37. (Of course, the differences we are discussing are not statistically significant, but I like to think that the audience was tracking my thoughts, since I was part of the audience.)

Kauffmann’s scores might have suffered the same fate as Graupner’s if his solo cantata “Unverzagt, beklemmtes Herz” had received its own North American premiere. Unfortunately, soprano Céline Ricchi, who was to have sung at the concert, took ill; fortunately, Abraham found Emily Noël to take her place, and Noël did an amazing job singing the remainder of the scheduled music with a week’s study. Her energetic characterization of “Komm, komm, mein Herze” from Kauffmann’s cantata made the aria sound better than it really was, and her duet with Humphries in the aria that opens BWV 23, the two voices ably navigating Bach’s intricately intertwined melodic lines, helped reestablish Bach’s supremacy at concert’s end. Bass Phillip Collister sang commandingly all evening, his voice like a summons to order; it achieved an especially dramatic effect in BWV 22; with a recitative like a sermon on steroids.

Some of the instrumental contributions were not up to the Bach Sinfonia’s usual standard. The violin section sounded sour and out-of-tune for BWV 22, although they shaped up and played better for most of the remainder of the concert. No such luck for the oboes, who had some unfortunate mistimed entrances (including one mistook-the-recitative-for-the-aria moment) and never quite got on point. As always, though, the continuo section of cellist Douglas Poplin and violone player Robbie Link played tight, strong, and imaginatively, with an assist on organ from Dongsok Shin. Trumpeters Joshua Cohen and Stanley Curtis had a brilliant sound that probably helped Kauffmann and Graupner score a few points over the trumpetless Bach entries.

That last point indicates the limits of relying strictly on layperson rating. On the other hand, from what I could hear, the audience discussed the music excitedly at intermision, waited eagerly for Abraham to announce the results post-concert (even though the concert went pretty late into the Saturday night), and generally buzzed with enthusiasm for the task of listening closely to the music. I’d say that makes the Bach Sinfonia’s idea for presenting this concert a successful one.

YOUR POINTLESS NOTES FOR THIS CONCERT

• For the record, I gave the two Bach pieces an 8 and a 9; the Graupners a 9, 7, and 4; and the Kauffmann a 6.
• My mom and my other concertgoing companion both felt that Emily Noel’s dress was extremely cute. Apparently it had ruching. I was going to look up how to spell that, but I’ve decided it’s more authentic to potentially misspell it.
• Violinist Risa Browder has Michelle Obama arms. I know you don’t need to be jacked to play the violin, but it doesn’t hurt, I assume.
• The Bach Sinfonia’s last concert this year is May 5, which means I personally can’t go, but you should go, because it has the music of Jan Dismas Zelenka, and that stuff is worth hearing. Trust me.

Other People’s Perspectives: Anne Midgette.

Bach Stars: The Bach Project at Montgomery College’s Cultural Arts Center in Silver Spring, January 28, 2012

Flutists Stephen Schultz and Kathie Stewart and cellist David Ellis, performing as The Bach Project, played as a trio for only the opening and closing works on their Saturday night program, presented under the auspices of the Bach Sinfonia at Montgomery College’s Cultural Arts Center in Silver Spring. These two works, however, were two of the four London Trios for this unusual combination of instruments by none other than Franz Joseph Haydn. (No, not a Bach, but too good to leave out, obviously.)

Big Papa Haydn’s keen understanding of the timbres and capabilities of the instruments allowed him to constantly play with the light textures of the combo while still packing the trios full of the kind of witty, elevated invention we have come to call Haydnesque. Schultz, Stewart and Ellis, playing Hadyn-period instruments in the historically informed style (this was a Bach Sinfonia concert, after all), gave a performance where the music sprang to life from the first notes with the kind of carefree joy that comes to audiences only from the previous hard work of performers.

It was all the more surprising, then, that later in the program Stewart announced that Schultz would skip his scheduled performance of a solo flute fantasia by Georg Philip Telemann because he had a bad head cold. I am not a professional flutist, but it seems to me that breathing is an important part of playing the flute; it’s tough to imagine how good he must sound when his various respiration-related passages are not obstructed. Thankfully, he was able to play everything else as scheduled on Saturday, and I hope he recovers soon.

Kathie Stewart, renowned Baroque flutist, is from Silver Spring, Maryland. What up S-Double? Photo by http://www.jessewphoto.com/

Stewart covered for him by playing the first movement of a flute sonata by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Like a lot of C.P.E.’s music, it can be heard as a young man’s rebellion against his famous papa, with phrases twisting up from their obvious conclusions into harmonically outré questions, moods changing seemingly bar-by-bar, and long pauses to make everyone think hard about the goings-on. Stewart committed fully to the ride, playing up the contrasts and wringing lots of drama out of her fermatas. Hearing the last two movements of the sonata after intermission allowed the first to hang in the air for a while like an unanswered question — an effect not inimical, I would guess, to C.P.E.’s intentions, and certainly a fun effect on Saturday.

Those of you not steeped in 18th-century musical lore may be wondering how the Bach Project could gin up an entire program of music for flutes. If you guessed “Some guy with a lot of money and/or power played the flute,” you are of course right: That person was Frederick the Great, German potentate and skilled amateur tootler. Besides C.P.E.’s opus (his only work for solo flute), F.d.G. likely played two other works on Saturday’s program, duets by C.P.E.’s bro Wilhelm Friedemann and the king of the Baroque flute, Johann Joachim Quantz, who conveniently had the king who played the Baroque flute as his patron.

This guy fathered 20 children with two wives. Ladies love cool Johann!

On Saturday, W.F. Bach’s “Duetto” in E minor mostly sounded dour; Schultz and Stewart made fetching noises, but W.F. did not vary those noises enough to avoid monotony. Quantz came off much better in his D major Duetto, which showed a command of the various means of combining two flutes to imply harmonies that can only come from high-level familiarity. S&S made cool, poised work of the minor-key Mesto (“sadly”) slow movement, finding a kernel of real emotion, then swept all that away with a glittering fast finale. Jacques Hotteterre attained prominence as a flutist and composer similar to that of Quantz, and his suite for two flutes had similar fluency in the instruments and vivacity in the music.

Like most people, I was not super-familiar with the literature for two or fewer flutes and no other instruments before this concert, so the only music on the program with which I was intimately familiar was the second suite for solo cello by the Bach from which the Sinfonia got its name. In his Haydn performances with Schultz and Stewart, Ellis provided a firm rhythmic underpinning, hitting his notes at just the right time to keep the melody aloft; playing by himself, he took a much more mercurial approach, sometimes burying the dance rhythms on which the suite draws in expressive gestures, sometimes accelerating or decelerating at unexpected times.

The constant gear-shifting made the opening movements feel a bit aimless, but in the “Sarabande” Ellis shaped the phrases so they sounded organic, like breathing, a striking effect. He also dug into the rhythms a little more in the final two dances, which made their effect stronger (for me, anyway). And throughout, his cello sounded lovely, rich and warm but with the occasional rasp and whisper that make the period cello such a captivating instrument. It was good to have all three performers on stage for the Haydn that closed the concert: we got to hear Schultz and Stewart back on classical flutes, along with Ellis — hearing, one last time, these instruments so well-played and playing so well together was a final treat in a concert full of them.

THE AUTHOR OF THIS BLOG IS FROM SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

For this concert, Stewart not only wrote the program notes (which were engaging and lucid – professional program note writers should take heed) but also provided some intro remarks before most of the pieces (except Ellis’ solo). In one of these interludes, she mentioned that she is from Silver Spring (a graduate of Northwood HS) and that Schultz also has family in Silver Spring and in Rockville. It just goes to show – people from Silver Spring do great things. Or start blogs about other people who do great things.

Big Screen Dreams: Bach Sinfonia at Montgomery College, May 7, 2011

A couple years ago, the Bach Sinfonia moved its concerts from Woodside United Methodist Church to the new Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center at Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus. In doing so, they lost a bit in acoustics (I still remember fondly the golden glow WUMC cast on all music made therein) but gained padding on the seats, ample parking and restrooms, and better climate control — overall, a good trade.

The advantages of the giant screen that can be lowered behind the new venue’s stage were less obvious until Saturday, when the Bach Sinfonia’s music/artistic director Daniel Abraham unveiled the results of a collaboration with Yana Sakellion and Yan Da, both designers and visual artists, designed to bring 21st-century technology to bear on presenting a period-style performance of the best-loved classics of the 18th century, Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

Vivaldi actually presented these concerti as a multimedia experience, if we count music and text as separate media, since someone (perhaps Vivaldi) wrote sonnets designed to concretize the seasonal scenarios depicted in these first four concerti from Big Tony’s Opus 12. There’s even a system by which the lines of the sonnets are tied to lines of music. So one obvious thing to do onscreen was to show the words. In a pre-concert discussion, though, Abraham indicated that talking with his American University colleague Sakellion suggested the idea of creating a response to the music. She brought in Da, and the idea grew.

What they came up with had three elements. First, the words, which zoomed onto the screen from the right, with one word in a phrase assembling itself and then dissolving out of seasonal graphic elements (fluttering leaves, boiling suns, etc.). Abraham controlled these, as he left the direction of the orchestra to guest soloist Ingrid Matthews. (A concerto grosso by Vivaldi and intro music by Pietro Antonio Locatelli, directed by Abraham without Matthews or screen accompaniment, confirmed the Sinfonia’s continued Baroque fitness without visual aids.) Then, a series of shifting, relatively abstract images, controlled by Sakellion. Finally, a software package called Max/MSP tracked things that were happening in the music (changing pitch, volume, etc.) and made up paths for the seasonal graphic elements, which Da could then process in what he called “post-conducting.”

Something like what we saw Saturday

All this sounds fearsomely complicated, but it was designed to be in the background; indeed, it would have been hard to take too much attention away from Matthews’ “Four Seasons.” She produced a superlatively clear, clean tone on Saturday, the type that makes even the most passive listener perk up and take notice, and she directed the Sinfonia in performances as vigorous and stylish as we have come to expect from their efforts under Abraham. Though her solos lacked the extroverted dazzle that I always think Vivaldi must have commanded, they showed a searching temperament married to keen instincts for melodic ornamentation, resulting in moments of genuine spontaneity in music with which we are all superlatively familiar.

Unfortunately, a few moments in spontaneous rhythm drew Matthews out of sync with the rock-solid rhythm section, anchored on Saturday by baroque guitarist William Simms, cellist Douglas Poplin, and violone player Robbie Link. She also could have varied her tone more, perhaps roughing up the rustic imagery in the “Autumn” concerto, or making her sound more sere in the scorching “Summer.” But these are minor points in comparison with her major successes: When she scaled back her volume to mingle with the Sinfonia’s violins in birdsong during “Spring,” the music seemed to be floating in midair, and her soliloquy towards the end of “Autumn”‘s first movement similarly seemed to suspend time, while her “Winter” sound was as icy as anyone could want.

Ingrid Matthews, the person I spent most of the time looking at on Saturday

My major quibble with the screen’s contribution to the performance experience, ironic considering the genesis of the project, was that the assembling and dissolving of the text took my eyes off Matthews and the band for what seemed like inhumanly long periods of time, though it must have been mere seconds. It also make the resulting words harder to read (was that an “i” or an “l”?). The background coloring (green for spring, red for summer, etc.) set moods nicely, and the images similarly evoked the sonnets, though I got tired of seeing that one guy all “Autumn.” The real-time processing produced some entrancing effects, especially in “Spring” with the leaves tracing lacy arcs across the screen, and some boring ones, like when it was all too obvious that Max/MSP was listening almost solely to pitch and Da wasn’t interfering. The total effect would have been more vivid if the stage lights hadn’t washed everything out a bit.

Still, when the big screen came down, no one in the audience, or even behind the MacBook screens from which Abraham, Sakellion, and Da controlled it all, knew exactly what was going to happen. When Matthews had space to explore her music, even having heard these concerti so many times, it was hard to predict what would come next. And so 18th-century and 21st-century spontaneity came together on Saturday. It wasn’t always successful, but given the artists involved, I’d certainly go back to see them try it again.

Other People’s Pespectives: Charles T. Downey.

GETTIN’ FAMILIAR

The violinists at Saturday’s performance were all veterans of many Sinfonia efforts. I started yammering to my concertgoing companion about their various strengths when I realized I was using their first names, like I knew them or something. It seemed weird.

Also, I encourage you to poke around Yan Da‘s site, which I have helpfully linked to again down here. That guy does a lot of interesting stuff, most of which I do not understand at first glance. But it looks worth exploring.

Mo’ Better Motets: The Bach Sinfonia at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring, March 6, 2010

Some people make art more freely and spontaneously when they’ve considered each and every possibility of how to make the art before finally setting on their path. On the evidence of many Bach Sinfonia concerts, but particularly Saturday’s performance of the complete motets of Johann Sebastian Bach at Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring Performing Arts Center, the Sinfonia’s music and artistic director Daniel Abraham is one of those people. Here, careful consideration of all the questions about and facets of those works led directly to some really astonishing performances.

Talking to the audience both before and during the concert, Abraham broke down in detail the impetuses behind the performance choices he’d made: the use of oboes da caccia rather than regular oboes as accompaniment for certain motets, the scholarship indicating that the chorales that traditionally close certain motets were added much later to the scores, the number of voices Bach had at his disposal versus the number he would have liked, even the gaps in our knowledge of why the motets were written. (Daniel R. Melamed‘s program notes provided even more fascinating detail about the motets.)

The performances showed the evidence of Abraham’s great care, plus his good choices in freelance performers. The Sinfonia Voci, on Saturday a sixteen-voice chorus, enunciated super-clearly (you didn’t need to look at the program at all to follow the German text) yet easily filled the hall when called upon to do so.  Most of the motets call for two choruses, which on Saturday stood facing each other in a big V so that, from the center of the hall, you really felt the drama of Bach’s antiphonal distribution of the music, with each chorus driving the music forward in turn. The effect worked especially dramatically in the more homophonic motets like “Fürchte dich nicht, ich bein bei dir” (“Fear have none, I am with thee”) and “Ich lasse dich nicht” (“I won’t let you go”), thought to be from relatively early in Bach’s career. And the Voci stayed fresh and lively throughout the concert, a feat considering that nothing happens in the motets without someone singing; as the instrumental accompaniment merely doubles the vocal lines.

As ever, Abraham conducted with an eye towards lively rhythms, almost dancing as he lifted the beat for his ensemble; the Voci took his directions into their bodies, with frequent sympathetic head-bobbing. The rhythmic vitality gave Bach’s counterpoint a special lift, particularly in the fugue on “Alles, was Oden hat, lobe den Herrn” (“All things that breathe, praise the Lord”) in “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied” (“Sing to the Lord a new song”), which became a glorious cathedral made of fast-moving yet clear strands of melody. The final section of “Fürchte dich nicht,” in which soprano text is laid over a chorale in the other voices, sounded impossibly rich for 16 people, yet never became soggy due to its steady pulse.

The five soloists took on a special burden, singing with the massed Voci as well as exposing their single voices to scrutiny, yet when called upon they made their music special. The longest and darkest of Bach’s motets, “Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, my true pleasure”), features the most solo work as well, and the contrast of the lone voices with the fuller vocal sweep of the chorus was heartwrenching; in “Gute Nacht, o Wesen” (“Good night, O creature”), in which sopranos Laura Heimes and Abigail H. Lennox, alto Anne Marieke Evers, and tenor Scott Mello kept Bach’s counterpoint aloft like a feather on a breath, floating between the soloists, gorgeous and sad. (Though bass Steven Combs was not involved in this most outstanding solo effort, rest assured he sang well too.)

In addition to vocal-part doubling from strings and winds (smartly played on Saturday), Abraham and Melamed argue strongly for continuo playing to accompany these motets, and violone player Robbie Link and organist Adam Pearl made that a treat too. Apart from a couple minor live-performance slipups, there was no weak link in this performance — at times I lost track of the fact that the music was being performed, because the Bach Sinfonia and Voci laid it out with such effortless joy. Instead, the music seemed to be hanging in the hall for me to glide through and explore. (A rare effect for a performance to have on a critic, to be sure.)

You wouldn’t think anyone would need to argue for the wonderfulness of vocal music of Bach, and yet at least in my recollection the motets aren’t professionally performed in the DMV nearly as often as the Mass or the two big Passions, while they sit a little bit above the capacity of the typical Lutheran church’s choir. Given the demands placed on the vocalists, you wouldn’t expect to hear a group try to do all six motets that are generally accepted as authentic in an evening. But Abraham and the Sinfonia Voci even tossed in a bonus seventh motet just because they like the “Alleluja” as a way to close a concert. And reliable attribution of authorship be damned, it was worth it, particularly in this memorable performance.

Other People’s Perspectives: Joan Reinthaler.

Updated March 17, 2010, to correct several minor but embarrassing errors.

Wind Me Up, Antoine: Circa 1800, Saturday, January 23, 2010

Paul Hopkins, showing off his period horn to conclude an instrument demo/lecture before the second half of the wind quintet Circa 1800‘s program at the Takoma Part/Silver Spring Performing Arts Center at Montgomery College on Saturday night, said that modern instruments will play any note you want as loud as you want, but they sound “monochromatic” to his ears. He and the other four-fifths of Circa 1800 — Colin St. Martin, flute; Meg Owens, oboe; Richard Spece, clarinet; and Anna Marsh, bassoon — gave the audience the period-instrument color it had been missing, in a program of three works designed to trace the genesis of the wind quintet. The Bach Sinfonia presented the concert, and even though Saturday’s repertoire strayed from the Baroque into the Classical and early Romantic eras, the easy-to-enjoy educational mission and high-quality musicianship made the concert fit right in with the Sinfonia’s ethos.

The demonstrations helped the audience understand how the quintet’s composite sound, so rich with shades and savory with unique tangs and aftertastes, came from the five individual instruments. St. Martin’s flute could produce the weak, floaty sound we associated with the baroque flute, but perked up with the application of a key. Hopkins gave a virtuoso demonstration of how to make the natural horn play all the pitches in a scale by putting his hand in the bell of the horn and manipulating the sound. The other instrumentalists gave valuable background on their instruments; even if their demos were not quite as thorough, the instruments sounded vivid when playing.

Circa 1800 expertly blended its members’ sounds, and each instrumentalist played about as well as you can expect on a period instrument in a live concert. (There’s a reason keys were eventually added to the horn; they allow for more accurate and reliable note production, even if the sound itself takes on an overexposed quality.) The enjoyment factor of the performances thus hinged on the quality of the compositions.

Francesco Antonio Rosetti wrote the very first wind quintet, around 1780, and like a lot of first efforts it doesn’t do more than scratch the surface of the possibilities of the form. True, its slow movement has an entertaining false ending in the wrong key, which Circa 1800 brought off with extreme understatement, and Spece had to do some fancy fast clarinetting in the finale, but otherwise not much in the quartet delivered the goods entertainment-wise. The Rosetti did provide a fine opportunity to dip into C1800′s range of tone colors, though, with Owens’ oboe particularly winsome in the first movement.

Proceeding in chronological order, the quintet next played Giuseppe Maria Gioacchino Cambini’s 1802 effort in D minor. This opus opened a few new compositional doors, with the key’s dark harmonies adding a new lustrous quality to the quintet’s sound. The Larghetto established patterns in which one player would drop out as the others carried on, with the instruments changing each time; the regular changes, mated with the unpredictable coloris, had a hypnotic effect. The finale featured some lively rhythms and challenging parts, which Circa 1800 navigated stylishly.

But Antoine Joseph Reicha provided the evening’s main event with his Quintet in E-Flat Major, Op 88 No. 2, written sometime between 1811 and 1820. (The program notes, which at Bach Sinfonia concerts are normally lively and informative without being pedantic, were a little thin on Saturday.) This quintet, part of a set of five that I plan to purchase sometime soon in recorded format for further enjoyment, provided a stiff test for Circa 1800′s virtuosity, and they had the chops to meet it. Marsh’s bassoon gave a stentorian tone to the theme that opened the first movement, but the air of seriousness soon dispersed in some fun variations. Owens got to lead the charge in a catchy, toe-tapping Menuetto that balanced adventuresome development with a well-sprung dance rhythm.

We really got to hear Reicha’s mastery in the last two movements, though. The opening section of the epic “Poco andante” featured no flute at all, rich and impressive, but in the next section St. Martin’s flute had the melody with Hopkins playing soft hunting calls in accompaniment — an ear-tickling juxtaposition, with explorations almost as appealing to follow. The closing rondo had unexpected twists nearly worthy of Reicha’s buddies Beethoven and Haydn, and the zest with which Circa 1800 met the challenge  (and the Reicha in general) elevated the concert from merely pleasant to invigorating. The new sensations from old tone-colors are all well and good, but they shine best when a composer knows how to use that palette.

A Gross (Or So) Of Concerti: Bach Sinfonia at Montgomery College Performing Arts Center, October 24, 2009

So many programs juxtapose essentially unrelated works and leave it to the audience to figure out why they’re being played together that the program artistic director Daniel Abraham developed for the Bach Sinfonia’s first concert of the 2009-10 season (not to mention the first concert in the Montgomery College Performing Arts Center in beautiful downtown Silver Spring) qualifies as something of a blockbuster. Titled “The Story of the Baroque Concerto Grosso,” it told just that, with works representative and vivid enough that the listener could easily imagine them in conversation.

Arcangelo Corelli’s Op. 6 No. 7 concerto grosso seemed to be discussing with Georg Muffat’s Concerto IV from Armonico Tributo exactly who stole what ideas about juxtaposing a smaller solo group with the full orchestra. Alessandro Scarlatti took their innovations and complexified them with two fugues in three movements; Pietro Antonio Locatelli brought bustle and virtuoso fireworks and a sunny temperment to the party.

Abraham closed with the two heaviest hitters: Georg Friederic Handel’s sixth concerto from the greatest set of 12 of all, his Op. 6, with a shudderingly lyrical Musette anchoring gracefully complex invention; and Antonio Vivaldi’s third from his Op. 10, L’estro armonico, featuring four solo violins stepping out from the concertino group, set in relief against a larger orchestra.

Unfortunately, Saturday’s edition of the Sinfonia (it’s a pickup group with a number of mainstays) and music director Abraham had uneven success in realizing Abraham’s program. Both violin soloists Annie Loud and Wendy Harton Benner and the orchestra sounded pallid and tenative in the Corelli, with Loud’s violin too quiet to be easily heard over her cohort. (I can’t bring myself to make the joke.)

Near-chaos erupted in the Locatelli as the backing violins couldn’t coordinate their bracing runs with violinists Leslie Nero and Benner and viola soloist Henry Valoris. More generally, the exceptionally humid day seemed to be wreaking havoc on everyone’s tuning, and it showed up most in the violin section, which of course had the most players to coordinate; unison passages occasionally soured throughout the evening.

Yet violinist Marlisa del Cid Woods made poetry in Moffat’s occasionally square concerto, unspooling her melancholic Sarabande and Aria with a degree of rhythmic freedom that made Muffat’s melody pulse and sigh, with Nero an effective contrapuntal foil. Though Loud and Woods didn’t sparkle in the Scarlatti, they and the orchestra clearly presented its two contrasting fugues, lightening up with the Minuet finale. (Abraham referred to this as the “sorbet.”)

Both Handel and Vivaldi received performances that made their voices heard loudest in this compositional conversation. Benner dispatched Handel’s lead role with elegant authority and made his invention soar; the Musette became an emotional core, as Abraham got a plush tone from the strings and a hard push on its rhythms to build and release tension. The Vivaldi gave each of the four violinists time to shine; the diverse approaches of Benner, Loud, Woods, and Nero, which had caused occasional blending problems earlier, here made for a delicious stylistic buffet.

Throughout, Abraham asked for crisp tempos and vigorous rhythms from the orchestra, particularly its lower end. Douglas Poplin, who played ‘cello in all the concertante groups, threw himself into his music with gusto and assurance, most vividly so in the demanding Vivaldi. Harpsichordist Elena Tsai did not attack the beat or conjure inventive voicings in the way to which fans of the Sinfonia’s longtime harpischordist Michelle Roy are accustomed, but William Simms’ did both of those things in spades on the guitar and theoboro.

The Montgomery College Performing Arts Center has a pretty good hall, but it does not have quite the one-two punch of acoustic clarity and warmth of the Sinfonia’s former venue, the Woodside United Methodist Church. In its favor: It’s a nice-looking hall, with a combo of natural wood and cinderblock that’s attractive without being too plush, and it does have seats with padding rather than pews, bathrooms convenient to the actual stage, ample parking, etc. Probably a trade-up for all but the iron-buttocked. And though the concert had some flaws, it also showed the strengths — inventive programming, strong rhythms, and talented soloists — that make the Bach Sinfonia a worthy ornament to the hall, and vice versa.

WHEN YOUR BODY STARTS TO MOVE, IT JUST PUTS US ALL IN THE GROOVE

Marlisa del Cid Woods has a very expressive face, and she had an empathic facial expression during her sad music in the Moffat. Wendy Harton Benner has a less expressive face (at least when she plays), and stands regally erect on stage, with her violin almost perpendicular to her body, and the first word that comes to mind when I think of her playing is “commanding.” I wondered during the concert: Am I using my eyes to hear them play? Probably a little. And yet I can hear in my mind now Woods’ gentle rhythmic pulse imparting a casual grace to her line, and Benner’s crisp yet sensitive phrasing giving Handel a lift. But was my aural memory corrupted by my visual sensation? Ah, who knows.

In appearance-related notes, Elena Tsai’s glasses are extremely fashionable. They almost made me want to have a vision defect so I could correct it with similarly fashionable glasses.

THE BACH SINFONIA IS STALKING ME

Woodside United Methodist Church was about a four-minute walk from my old apartment. Then I moved. Now the Bach Sinfonia has moved into a new venue that is, if anything, even closer to my apartment. I hope they’ll have a chamber concert in my living room sometime! I’ve got…let’s see…12 chairs! C’mon!