Sacramento Music

I have recently attended a couple of concerts in Sacramento by groups I have not seen before.  It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to get out of town, so I am trying to know more about the place where I live.

Carlos & Brennen are a duo consisting of Brennen Milton on clarinet and Carlos M. Fuentes on piano.  For their recent concert at Crocker Art Museum they added soprano Robin Fisher.  Concerts at Crocker involve associating the repertoire to the current exhibits which in this case are landscapes.  When instrumental groups add a singer, they must track down repertoire for this specific combination.  So they needed pieces for clarinet, piano and soprano which illustrate the outdoors. For this concert we heard:

O Lady Moon by Alan Hovhaness, an American composer.  In this piece a cat and a rat are carrying a barrel of sake over Mount Fuji.

Coty by Quincy Hilliard, from Mississippi.  Daybreak, Sunset, Dance.  This is for only clarinet and piano.  The composer said it reminded him of his home.

Hirtenlied by Giacomo Meyerbeer.  Meyerbeer is most famous as a French opera composer, but this song is in German and translates to Shepherd Song.  The whole trio perform.  Again we are outdoors.

Three Vocalises by Ralph Vaughn Williams.  Prelude, Scherzo, Quasi menuetto.  This features only the soprano and clarinet and has no words.

Silentium Amoris by Carlos McMillan Fuentes, our pianist.  Seduction, Infatuation, Silentium Amoris.  The first two movements are instrumental and the third is the full trio on a poem by Oscar Wilde.

I very much enjoyed the variety of repertoire in this concert.  I'm always ready for something new.  Our clarinetist played from a score on a tablet (iPad?) with a foot pedal to turn pages.  I have a complaint:  they provided a sheet with English texts but did not provide sufficient light to be able to read it.  AND they specifically requested that people not use flashlights.

Sinfonia Spirituosa, a new group directed by Lorna Peters, harpsichord, performed at Clara.  This concert while all from the Baroque, was also varied.

Six movements from the Suite "La Bizarre" by Georg Philipp Telemann.  Overture, Gavotte en Rondeau, Sarabande, Fantasie, Minuet I and II, Rossignol.

Passamezzo and Gagliarda for Two Violins and Continuo by Johann Vierdanck.  I had never heard of this composer, but he was a student of Heinrich Schütz and died young.  For continuo we expected the usual cello and harpsichord, but got only the cello part.  This was very pleasing.

Chaconne in G Minor by Henry Purcell for the full ensemble.  The members of the ensemble varied quite a lot.  Then suddenly came "Curtain Tune on a Ground" from Timon of Athens.  Our version was very uptempo and jazzy sounding.  "Where am I?"  I love Henry Purcell best.

From the tragedie lyrique "Les Boreades" by Jean-Philippe Rameau.  Entree de Polimnie, Gavotte pour les heures et les zephirs, Minuet I and II, Contredanse en rondeau.

Sinfonia Spirituosa in D Major by Telemann.  Spirituoso, Largo, Vivace.  This is the group's theme music.

They are new and in only their second season.  It interests me how much is going on in the provincial city of Sacramento.  I wish them good luck.  If I have a complaint, it is the constant tuning.  This may be necessary with period instruments.

Coffee

Perhaps you thought being addicted to coffee was something new.  You would be mistaken.  Apparently in Bach's day it was limited to females.  Or perhaps it's the usual men get to do whatever they want while women have to be controlled.  Sacramento Baroque Soloists presented a semi-staged version of Johann Sebastian Bach's Coffee Cantata with three soloists:  Derek Keller as the narrator, Omari Tau as papa Schlendarian and Bernadette Mondok as his daughter Lischen.  This was charming and amusing.  Coffee was provided.

Sacramento Baroque Soloists are a new group for me, though I think they have been around Sacramento for a while.

The program was filled out with a concerto by Georg Philipp Telemann and Cantata BWV 54 by Bach.  Derek Keller was the soloist in the Bach Cantata where he billed himself as a countertenor, and later in the Coffee Cantata he was a tenor.  I didn't hear falsetto from him.  For me he sounded more like a haute contra, a French style of high tenor.  He sounded fine, just not like a countertenor.

Camerata Capistrano

Camerata Capistrano, led by Dr. Lorna Peters, is a Baroque ensemble from California State University Sacramento.  They were joined in this concert by the Davis Senior High School Baroque Orchestra led by Angelo Moreno.  A Baroque orchestra in a high school is a surprise.

The violins, violas and high winds performed standing.  Dr. Peters seemed unclear that the purpose of this fad was to offer the players the opportunity to sway around while playing.  In Apollo's Fire the conductor also stands at the harpsichord and sways around.  Angelo Moreno, who performed with his ensemble rather than standing in front of it, seemed clearer on the idea.  His group swayed quite a lot.

Arias for Farinelli

This was very much a Baroque weekend.  On Saturday night was Vivica Genaux with the Philharmonia Baroque in Berkeley doing her Arias for Farinelli program.

Philharmonia Baroque performs in the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, and after living in Sacramento for a while, I am feeling a bit of envy for such a spacious room with such nice acoustics.

This was sort of an anyone but Bach concert from the generation born from the decade 1678-88:

• We begin with a concerto for six woodwinds by Johann Friedrich Fasch, who worked within 50 miles of Bach.  This was on the program as a memorial for two of their woodwind players who died last spring.

• Then Vivica thrilled us with three arias by Antonio Vivaldi.

• Georg Philipp Telemann's "Sinfonia Spirituosa"

• Then we have two arias by Nicola Porpora and one by Roccardo Broschi.  Broschi is heard only because he was Farinelli's brother and wrote a number of show piece arias for him.  He is younger than the others.  These were pretty flashy.

• The program closed with a suite by Jean -Philippe Rameau from La Guirlande.  This included some very primitive looking percussion--a tall drum and a tambourine. 

• Vivica sang "Agitata da due venti" from Vivaldi's Griselda as an encore.  I don't think it was as funny as this film.

 

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Musicology

I think musicology must have been invented by the Germans. And for a long time it was completely dominated by Germans.

We had a pretty good music library in my college, and it was filled with shelves of very large books. These included the complete works of J.S. Bach and Telemann. I remember that Telemann had more books on his shelf than Bach, but Bach made up for this with the beginnings of a new set. German musicologists had run out of German composers to study and were starting over with an old one.

In school we studied and performed all manner of pieces by J.S. Bach, but I had at that time never heard anything by Telemann.

If an Italian had performed an opera in a German city, it would appear in one of the miscellaneous collections called Denkmäler. The aim was to create a performable score for all possible German repertoire.

I remember on one of my recitals I performed "Vernügte Ruh," a solo cantata by Bach. To make the parts for the players I made Xerox copies of the score and cut and pasted this into parts. It was possinble to buy a piano vocal score, but not parts. It worked fine.

Scores from Ricordi or Schirmer made do for the Italians.

Our time is the age of Italian musicology, undertaken by scholars from many nations. Professor Gosset in Chicago oversees the publication of the complete works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.

Claudio Osele continues his own castrato project.



The musical scores for all the arias on the Sacrificium concert and even some of the instrumental numbers were prepared by Martin Heimgartner. The program even lists the documentary sources which come from all over Europe.

It is wonderful to see this. Perhaps the unknown Italians will become familiar. For most of my life Porpora was a character in a novel by George Sand (Consuelo). Now at last he is a composer.

Camerata Capistrano

Camerata Capistrano is a student group at California State University, Sacramento led by Lorna Peters. I say led because she never conducts, apparently, though she did play harpsichord on one number. The students just gather and play. I heard her last year at Crocker Art Gallery where she played an entire concert of French harpsichord music without including Francois Couperin.

This reminded me a little of Giardino Armonico where they stand around while they play instead of sitting. In the first half Holly Harrison played a viola concerto by Telemann--no jokes this time--and Bill Damian played a piccolo concerto by Vivaldi. This was a fun piece, and Bill is an excellent piccolo player.

At the end of intermission Dr. Peters said that when she was an undergraduate she was involved in a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and ever since she had wanted the opportunity to create this music. It's the kind of music that sticks with you.

I also took part in a performance of the Matthew Passion when I was a senior in college. It was life changing. Only a brief selection was presented here, but it was quite beautiful. They did the closing chorus, one of Bach's most beautiful.

Telemann

I went today to hear a chamber music concert made up entirely of the music of Georg Philipp Telemann, a contemporary of Bach and Handel. I can't recall that I ever performed anything by him, but I can remember seeing his shelf of books in the library. It's bigger than Bach's.

The performers were a harpsichordist, a cellist, two violinists, a flautist and a soprano in various combinations. The flute, a violinist and the harpsichordist each played alone. All played together in a German language cantata on the Magnificat which began the program.

Telemann was quite the comic, apparently. The concert included Trauermusik on the death of a canary. The canary would be missed and the cat would be beaten. There is deep sadness and melodrama.

More comedy could be found in the Gulliver Suite for 2 violins. The movements are:

Intrada
Lilliputsche Chaconne (all 32nd notes)
Brogdingnagische Gigue (all whole notes)
Gulliver Suite for two violins: Reverie der Laputier, nebst ihren Aufweckern
Loure der gesitten Houyhnhnms & Furie der unartigen Yahoos

These are inside jokes since it sounded like a suite.

The concert ended with something called a quartet played by four instruments, flute, violin, cello and harpsichord. As anyone knows, four instruments in the Baroque is a trio. The two instruments of the continuo count as only one. In this piece the cello and harpsichord are composed as legitimate separate parts, entering and dropping out separately with no hints of doubling. It was written in Paris and may have reflected the advancement of the rococo found in Paris at that time. It was said that he was the first German composer to travel to Paris. They would naturally have preferred Italy.

Times are changing. Perhaps Telemann will have a comeback.