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Muti to conduct an opera academy in China

April 15, 2024
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By Jacob Stockinger

Italian maestro Riccardo Muti (below) — the 83-year-old retired music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and longtime music director of the iconic La Scala Opera House in Milan— will take his workshops for young conductors and musicians to China for the first time this coming November and December.

Muti is a devoted advocate and practitioner of music education, and has led similar academies in: Ravenna and Milan, Italy; Tokyo, Japan; and Seoul, South Korea.

In a story published in Chinese media, Muti explains why he chose China this time. There he will work in the city of Suzhou with the Suzhou Symphony Orchestra and with individual applicants from around the world.

“During the past decades, classical music has gained a large fan base in China, with new concert halls and new symphony orchestras appearing in the country,” Muti adds. “There are also many great Chinese musicians performing around the world — pianists, violinists, singers and conductors — who have become like bridges, bringing our countries closer to each other.”

The repertoire he has chosen to work on is the one-act Italian opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry) by Pietro Mascagni.

It seems a perfect choice to The Ear. It is shorter and easier to stage than most full-length operas. It uses the Roman Catholic Church and religion as well as other aspects of European and Italian society and culture. This includes the famous “Regina Coeli” or Easter Hymn (below):

The opera itself has beautiful parts for the vocal soloists, the chorus and the orchestral instrumentalists — as you can hear above and in the famously melodic Intermezzo (in the YouTube video at the bottom) that was used in the film “The Godfather.”

Here is a link to the full story from the China Daily newspaper:

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202404/13/WS661a1d39a31082fc043c1c81.html

You might also recall an earlier blog post about the recent successes of Asian classical musicians:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/?s=Asian+musicians

When it comes to Western classical music in China, it seems that success keeps building on success.

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Here is a collaborative obituary for music critic, radio host, performer and gay pioneer Jess Anderson, who died in January at 85

March 7, 2021
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By Jacob Stockinger

In late January of this year, Jess Anderson (below) — a longtime friend, devoted musician and respected music critic – died at 85.

The Ear promised then that when more was known or written, it would be posted on this blog.

That time has come.

Jess was a polymath, a Renaissance Man, as the comments below attest to time and again.

For the past several years, he suffered from advancing dementia and moved from his home of 56 years to an assisted living facility. He had contracted COVID-19, but died from a severe fall from which he never regained consciousness.

Jess did not write his own obituary and he had no family member to do it. So a close friend – Ed Wegert (below) – invited several of the people who knew Jess and worked with him, to co-author a collaborative obituary. We are all grateful to Ed for the effort the obituary took and for his caring for Jess in his final years.

In addition, the obituary has some wonderful, not-to-be-overlooked photos of Jess young and old, at home, with friends, sitting at the piano and at his custom-built harpsichord.

It appears in the March issue of Our Lives, a free statewide LGBTQ magazine that is distributed through grocery stores and other retail outlets as well as free subscriptions. Here is a link to the magazine’s home webpage for details about it: https://ourliveswisconsin.com.

That Jess was an exceptional and multi-talented person is obvious even from the distinguished names of the accomplished people who contributed to the obituary:

They include:

Chester Biscardi (below), who is an acclaimed prize-winning composer, UW-Madison graduate, composer and teacher of composition at Sarah Lawrence College.

John Harbison (below), the MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who teaches at MIT and co-directs the nearby Token Creek Chamber Music Festival in the summer.

Rose Mary Harbison (below), who attended the UW-Madison with Jess and became a professional performing and teaching violinist who co-directs the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival.

Steve Miller (below), a close friend who became a bookmaker and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.

The Ear, who knew Jess over many decades, was also invited to contribute.

Here is a link to the joint obituary in Our Lives magazine, a free LGBTQ periodical that you can find in local grocery store and other retail outlets: https://ourliveswisconsin.com/article/remembering-jess-anderson/?fbclid=IwAR027dzv2YqRUNlYF1cF6JyXnEcQxAwcprPYbtBQCs3rYt0Nu847W_xbjpk

Feel free to leave your own thoughts about and memories of Jess in the comment section.

It also seems a fitting tribute to play the final chorus from The St. John Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. You can hear it in the YouTube video below. It is, if memory serves me well, the same piece of sublime music that Jess played when he signed off from hosting his Sunday morning early music show for many years on WORT-FM 89.9.

Posted in Classical music
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The Madison Bach Musicians will open its new season with a virtual online concert of Haydn and Mozart this Saturday night and Sunday afternoon

October 1, 2020
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By Jacob Stockinger

The Ear has received the following announcement, about a promising contrast-and-compare concert, from the Madison Bach Musicians:

The Madison Bach Musicians (MBM) will start its 17th season this Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, Oct. 3 and 4, with a virtual chamber music concert and livestream event featuring the irrepressibly joyous, witty and poised music of Classical-era masters Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).

The performances features period instruments and historically informed performance practices.

See details near the bottom about the schedules and how to buy tickets.

Performers are violinist Kangwon Kim and cellist James Waldo (on gut-strung period instruments), fortepianist Trevor Stephenson, and soprano soloist Morgan Balfour — winner of the 2019 Handel Aria Competition. (Below top is Kangwon Kim; below middle is James Waldo; and below bottom is Morgan Balfour.)

The broadcast will begin with a 30-minute pre-concert lecture by MBM artistic director Trevor Stephenson (below, in a photo by Kent Sweitzer) illuminating the program’s repertoire, the lives of Haydn and Mozart, and the aesthetic aims of the period instruments.

While most of the pieces on the program are buoyant and full of celebration, the concert will begin with a pensive and melancholy work commensurate with our current pandemic times.

Mozart composed the Sonata in E minor for violin and fortepiano in 1778 at the age of 22 while on tour in Paris. His mother, who was with him on the tour, became suddenly ill and died unexpectedly. This sonata is the only piece of instrumental music Mozart ever composed in the key of E minor, and its blend of gravitas, sparseness and tenderness is heartbreakingly poignant.

Mozart’s Piano Trio in G major, composed in 1788, shows him at his sunniest and most affable, with one brilliant and catchy tune after another suspended effortlessly — at least in Mozart’s hands! ― within the balance of Classical form.

The program’s first half ends with five of Mozart’s songs. Mozart truly loved the soprano voice, and he lavished some of his greatest writing upon it. The set includes perhaps his best-known song, Das Veilchen (The Violet)―which is also, oddly enough, Mozart’s only setting of a text by the German poet Goethe.

The second half of the concert is devoted to the music of Mozart’s near contemporary, Joseph Haydn, who was just 24 years older than Mozart.

Though the two composers came from very different musical and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Haydn (below) was lower working class, rural, and musical but not professionally trained.

Mozart (below) was urban, solid middle class, musically trained, sophisticated, and ambitious.

Both managed to carve out successful careers in the fertile musical culture of Vienna and its environs. They certainly knew each other and even made music together on occasion, playing in string quartets — with Haydn on violin and Mozart on viola.

Haydn composed two sets of English Canzonettas (songs) during his visits to England during the early 1790s.

The Mermaid, with its flirtatious beckoning, stretches the confines of the parlor setting (where this music was most likely performed) and suggests a cabaret environment. Fidelity, on the other hand, stays within the parlor style, emphasizing how the bond of devotion can overcome physical separation. Haydn brilliantly interweaves stormy, naturalistic episodes with declarations of unbending loyalty.

The concert will close with Haydn’s mercurial Piano Trio No. 27 in C major. Also composed during his London visits in the 1790s, this trio is the first of a set of three dedicated to the London-based virtuoso pianist Therese Bartolozzi. The Presto finale―with its unbridled high spirits―is a supreme example of Classical Era cheeky, theatrically conceived wit. (You can hear the finale in the YouTube video at the bottom.)

SCHEDULE AND TICKETS

As a result of public health guidelines in response to Covid-19 that do not allow for an in-person audience, we will livestream our concert from Grace Episcopal Church, downtown on Capitol Square, on Saturday evening for at-home viewing. (Below are Trevor Stephenson and Kangwon Kim rehearsing in masks at Stephenson’s home.)

The event will begin with a pre-concert talk by Trevor Stephenson at 7:30 p.m., and after the 8 p.m. concert, the musicians will remain on stage to answer questions submitted by our audience.

On Sunday, starting at 3 p.m. we will rebroadcast the Saturday evening recording and follow that with a live question-and-answer session with our musicians from their homes.

After purchasing tickets for $15 per household, you will be sent a link to access the performance. The recorded lecture and video will be available for up to 72 hours after they take place.

To purchase tickets, go to: https://madisonbachmusicians.org/oct-3-4-haydn-mozart/ or to: https://madison-bach-musicians.square.site/product/haydn-mozart-oct-3-4-livestream/54?cs=true

For information about the Madison Bach Musicians’ full season, go to: https://madisonbachmusicians.org/season-overview/

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Classical music: The successful centennial celebration of the Concert Series at the Wisconsin Union Theater continues this Friday night with a concert by the Kalichstein, Laredo and Robinson piano trio

December 5, 2019
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By Jacob Stockinger

This season marks the centennial of the Concert Series at the Wisconsin Union Theater (below are photos of the Memorial Union and Shannon Hall).

And so far, so good.

The anniversary features a variety of genres, and both individuals and ensembles, during the season-long event. Plus, many of the performers are returning to what The Ear calls “The Carnegie Hall of Madison.”

The anniversary started with a sold-out performance of the a cappella singing group Chanticleer and continued with a close to sold-out house for pianist Emanuel Ax in an all-Beethoven recital.

The first semester winds up this Friday night, Dec. 6, at 7:30 p.m. with the acclaimed piano trio of pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson (below).

The trio will be returning to Shannon Hall for the third time, this time as part of the new David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Series.

The program features both the familiar and the unfamiliar.

It starts with the rarely heard Canonic Etudes by Robert Schumann. Then it continues with two of the most popular piano trios in the repertoire: the Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor by Felix Mendelssohn and the “Archduke” Trio in B-Flat Major, Op. 97, by Ludwig van Beethoven. (You can hear the trio play the slow movement and finale of the “Archduke” Trio in the YouTube video at the bottom.)

Tickets are $10 to $50. For more information, go to: https://union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/kalichstein-laredo-robinson-trio/

The trio will also give a FREE and PUBLIC one-hour master class TODAY – Thursday, Dec. 5 — at 1:30 p.m. in the Collins Recital Hall of the new Hamel Music Center, 740 University Ave.

Such an activity is not unusual. Not only are the members of the trio active performers, they are also devoted to teaching and music education.

For more information about that side of the trio, read: https://union.wisc.edu/visit/wisconsin-union-theater/the-green-room/kalichstein-laredo-robinson-trio-shapes-future-performers/

And to learn more about the history of the trio, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, here is a link to its home website: http://www.kalichstein-laredo-robinson-trio.com

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Classical music: How did Baroque composer Telemann get overshadowed and why is he being rediscovered? Trevor Stephenson talks about his all-Telemann concerts this weekend

October 2, 2019
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IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST, PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE IT or TAG IT (not just “Like” it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event. And you might even attract new readers and subscribers to the blog.

By Jacob Stockinger

This weekend, the Madison Bach Musicians (MBM) will give two performances of a concert devoted exclusively to the music of Baroque composer Georg Philip Telemann (below).

The performances are: Saturday night, Oct. 5, at 8 p.m. in the Atrium Auditorium of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, where MBM will be artists-in-residence this season; the second performance is on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 6, at 3:30 p.m. at the Holy Wisdom Monastery, 4200 County Road M, in Middleton.

Tickets are $35 in advance and are available at the Willy Street Coop East and West, and at Orange Tree Imports. Tickets at the door are $38 for the general public; $35 for seniors; and $10 for student rush tickets that go on sale 30 minutes before each lecture. The lectures take place 45 minutes before the performance, at 7:15 p.m. and 2:45 p.m, respectively.

Why focus on the music of Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)?

Trevor Stephenson, the founder and director of the Madison Bach Musicians, talks about it in an email Q&A with The Ear:

Why does Telemann, who was so respected in his day, seem to get far less play, fewer performances and less mentioning today than his contemporaries Bach, Vivaldi and Handel?

Telemann was born in 1681 — three years after Vivaldi and four years before Bach and Handel. He was astonishingly prolific and it is estimated that he wrote more than Bach and Handel combined.

On top of this, he was very highly respected and was widely published and performed during his life. Remember, it was Telemann — not Bach — whom the Leipzig council wanted to hire for the music director position in 1723. But Telemann was enjoying his wonderful new post in Hamburg—a thriving port city — and was not about to go back to landlocked Leipzig where he had spent his student days.

At any rate, after the 18th century had passed and its music became somewhat marginalized, in the early 19th century it was Bach’s music, not Telemann’s, that suddenly re-emerged.

Bach’s tremendous emotional depth, contrapuntal mastery and ability to control large-scale forms in an almost heroic way spoke with greater urgency to the Romantic sensibility than did Telemann’s elegant craftsmanship. Indeed, 19th-century Bach scholars often mean-spiritedly used Telemann as a foil for Bach.

Telemann’s music nevertheless received a modicum of performances in the early 20th century, but in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Early Music movement really got rolling—and the level of period-instrument performance increased—it became apparent that Telemann’s music really was hot stuff!

Now his music is enjoying a wonderful and well-deserved revival.

What are the appealing and admirable qualities you see in Telemann’s music? Are there any drawbacks to his compositions?

Telemann had a wonderful sense of melodic invention — probably music’s analog to an artist’s ability to draw — and his tunes seem to flow out effortlessly. And although his output was opulent, he had an uncanny sense of form and how much weight – duration — any given musical scene could bear.

He also was a masterful musical polyglot, able to jump back and forth easily between Italian, French and German musical idioms; and like Bach, he was also adept at integrating them into a unified style—this integration of national styles was a frequently acknowledged goal of 18th-century composers.

Telemann’s limitations are apparent when he is juxtaposed with Handel, who could dramatically really take the roof off and who could also find the inner essence of the human voice, and Bach who, like Shakespeare, through a near alchemy of sound and meaning could consistently define and further what it means to be human.

How and why did you put this program together? What unifies it and what would you like the public to know about it?

Madison Bach Musicians’ concertmaster and assistant artistic director Kangwon Kim (below left with Emily Dupere) did the heavy lifting in putting together this wonderful program of Telemann’s chamber music. MBM will present three of Telemann’s programmatic or story works, one church cantata and three purely instrumental selections.

With narration and graphics, we’ll walk you through how he cleverly depicts scenes from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, below), which had been in print only two years when Telemann wrote his topical Gulliver Suite in 1728. Telemann loved ludicrous irony, like the tiny Lilliputians dancing a heavy chaconne—which Telemann notates in a hilarious, confounding mass of 64th and 128th notes. And then there’s the Brobdingnagian giants doing their rendition of a light-footed gigue, rendered in loopy, cumbersome whole notes!

We’ll also present the marvelous Suite Burlesque based upon Cervantes’ Don Quixote (below): Quixote’s love for Dulcinea, his jousting with windmills, and how a crowd mocks Quixote’s faithful, world-weary servant Sancho Panza.

To top it off, guest artist mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski (below) will sing the droll and sweetly amusing cantata about the demise — brought about by the cat! — of a favorite and very artistic canary. Osowski will also sing the church cantata Weicht, ihr Sünden, bleibt dahinten (Yield, You Sins, and Stay Behind Me). Telemann wrote more than 1,000 church cantatas.

The concert includes non-programmatic works for string band: the dramatic and Corelli-esque Sonata à 6 in F minor for two violins, two violas, cello and continuo; and the sparkling Sinfonia Spirituosa (heard in the YouTube video at the bottom). I will also perform some fascinating Fantasy miniatures for solo harpsichord, and will give a pre-concert lecture at both events.

For more information about the program, the performers and tickets, go to: www.madisonbachmusicians.org

Posted in Classical music
Tags: #18thCentury, #19thCentury, #20thCentury, #AntonioVivaldi, #ArcangeloCorelli, #AtriumAuditorium, #BaroqueComposer, #BaroqueContinuo, #BaroqueMusic, #BlogInterview, #BlogPost, #BlogPosting, #CelloMusic, #ChamberMusic, #ChristianChurch, #ClaraOsowski, #ClassicalMusician, #ContrapuntalMusic, #DonQuixote, #EarlyMusicMovement, #FacebookPost, #FacebookPosting, #FirstUnitarianSocietyofMadison, #GeorgeFridericHandel, #GeorgPhilippTelemann, #GuestArtist, #Gulliver'sTravels, #HamburgGermany, #HarpsichordMusic, #HeavyLifting, #HolyWisdomMonastery, #HotStuff, #HumanVoice, #InstrumentalMusic, #JohannSebastianBach, #JonathanSwift, #KangwonKim, #Large-scale, #LeipzigGermany, #MadisonBachMusicians, #Mezzo-sopranoSinger, #MigueldeCervantes, #MusicalStyle, #MusicDirector, #OrangeTreeImports, #PeriodInstrument, #PortCity, #Pre-concertLecture, #RomanticMusic, #SacredCantata, #SacredMusic, #SanchoPanza, #SaturdayNight, #SeniorCitizen, #StringMusic, #Sundayafternoon, #ViolaMusic, #ViolinMusic, #VocalMusic, #WholeNotes, #WilliamShakepseare, #WillyStreetCoop, #WillyStreetCoopEast, #WillyStreetCoopWest, 18th century, 19th century, 20th-century, ability, afternoon, alchemy, analog, analogue, Antonio Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli, artist, artist-in-residence, Atrium Auditorium, Bach, band, Baroque, behind, blog, Burlesque, Cantata, cellist, Cello, chaconne, Chamber music, Christian, Christianity, church, Clara Osowski, Classical music, classicalmusic, composer, Concert, concertmaster, contemporary, continuo, contrapuntal, control, Corelli, council, counterpoint, craftsmanship, crowd, cumbersome, dance, dancing, days, depth, devoted, Don Quixote, draw, Dulcinea, Early music, elegant, email, emotional, enjoy, exclusive, Facebook, faithful, fantasy, fascinating, First Unitarian Society of Madison, form, forward, French, Georg Philipp Telemann, George Frideric Handel, German, giant, giants, gigue, goal, guest artist, Gulliver's Travels, Hamburg, Handel, harpsichord, heavy lifting, heroic, hire, Holy Wisdom Monastery, hot stuff, human voice, idiom, instrumental, interview, invention, irony, Italian, Johann Sebastian Bach, Jonathan Swift, jousting, Kangwon Kim, landlocked, lecture, Leipzig, like, Lilliputian, link, loopy, Love, ludicrous, Madison Bach Musicians, marginalized, marvelous, mastery, me, mean-spirit, meaning, melodic, melody, mention, Mezzo-soprano, Middleton, Miguel de Cervantes, miniature, movement, Music, Music director, musical, musical style, national, night, notes, opulent, Orange Tree Imports, output, performance, performer, period-instrument, play, polyglot, port city, position, post, posting, programmatic, prolific, public, pure, Q&A, rediscover, respect, revival, Romantic, sacred cantata, sacred music, Sancho Panza, Saturday night, scene, scholar, senior, sense, sensibility, servant, Shakespeare, share, sins, solo, Sonata, Sound, story, string, Student, style, subscriber, Suite, Sunday, tag, tickets, tiny, tune, tunes, uncanny, unified, urgency, use, Viola, Violin, violinist, violist, Vivaldi, vocal music, weight, well-deserved, whole, whole notes, Willy Street Coop, windmill, Wisconsin, wonderfu, world-weary, yield

Classical music: Saturday is busy with baroque music by Vivaldi and Bach at the Wisconsin Union Theater; Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre” in cinemas; and FREE Beethoven performances for families by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra

March 28, 2019
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By Jacob Stockinger

This Saturday, March 30, is busy with classical music from morning until night.

In the morning, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s Family Series features two FREE performances of “Beethoven Lives Next Door” featuring Beethoven’s iconic Fifth Symphony.

They start with pre-concert educational activities at 9 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. with 40-minute concerts at 9:30 a.m. and 11:15 a.m.

All activities take place at the Warner Park Recreational Center, 1625 Northport Drive.

To get FREE tickets and see more information, go to:

https://wisconsinchamberorchestra.org/education/wco-connect-family-concerts/

From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., the penultimate Live From the Met in HD production of this season will feature “Die Walküre” (The Valkyries), the Metropolitan Opera’s second installment of the epic “Ring” cycle by Richard Wagner.

Screenings will be at the Point Cinema on the west side, near West Towne Mall, and the Palace Cinema in Sun Prairie.

The encore HD showings are next Wednesday, April 3, at 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

The opera will be sung in German with supertitles in English, Italian and Spanish.

Tickets for Saturday broadcasts are $24 for adults and $22 for seniors and children under 13. For encore showings, all tickets are $18.

It will also be broadcast live on Wisconsin Public Radio, starting at 11 a.m. (You can hear the famous and dramatic “Ride of the Valkyries” in the YouTube video at the bottom.)

For a cast list and synopsis, go to:

https://www.metopera.org/season/in-cinemas/synopsiscast/2018-19/die-walkure/?performanceNumber=15381

For information about the production, go to:

https://www.metopera.org/season/2018-19-season/die-walkure/

But the big local event is the Madison debut of Apollo’s Fire (below), a period-instrument baroque group that just won a 2019 Grammy Award, at 7:30 p.m. in Shannon Hall of the Wisconsin Union Theater.

The program features suite and concertos by Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach. Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins and “The Goldfinch” Flute Concerto will be featured as will Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 and Brandenburg Concerto No. 3.

Trevor Stephenson, founder and director of the Madison Bach Musicians, will give a FREE pre-concert lecture at 6 p.m. in the Old Madison Room.

For more information and samples of rare reviews about the Cleveland-based group devoted to passionate and dramatic performances of early music, go to:

https://apollosfire.org

For the full program, background, videos and ticket information ($10-$47), go to:

https://union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/apollos-fire/

Posted in Classical music
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Classical music: The Middleton Community Orchestra and solo trumpeter Jessica Jensen score big with an unusual program

March 2, 2019
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By Jacob Stockinger

Here is a special posting, a review written by frequent guest critic and writer for this blog, John W. Barker. Barker (below) is an emeritus professor of Medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a well-known classical music critic who writes for Isthmus and the American Record Guide, and who hosts an early music show once a month on Sunday morning on WORT FM 89.9 FM. For years, he served on the Board of Advisors for the Madison Early Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison. He also took the performance photos.

By John W. Barker

The concert by the largely amateur Middleton Community Orchestra (below, in a photo by Margaret Barker) on Wednesday night presented a novel program at the Middleton Performing Arts Center.

In the relatively brief first part, it presented two unusual items.

The first was by Nebojsa “Neb” Macura (b. 1982, below right with conductor Steve Kurr), a local musician of Serbian background, who has been particularly identified with Russian folk music and ensembles. But he also plays viola in the MCO, which gave him this opportunity in the spotlight.

His piece, Polar Night, is quite brief, but in this version for full orchestra (with piano), it is grounded with secure melodic flow, and it unfolds into a tonal picture full of beautiful colors. My only reservation was that I wanted more of it — either more music in this piece or other sections around it.

Macura is obviously talented, and he has a confident sense of orchestral writing. I really look forward to hearing more of him. Indeed, the MCO might well serve as exactly the laboratory in which he can develop new creations.

The second item was only a bit longer, a Trumpet Concerto by Russian composer Aleksandra Pakhmutova (b. 1929, below). Her long career has involved her in jazz, and also in extensive scoring for films. But she has a feeling for Russian traditional song, and that could be heard in this concerto.

It is cast in only a single movement, but it proceeds episodically. There is certainly much flashy writing for the solo instrument, and local trumpeter Jessica Jensen (below) brought off her role dashingly.

The longer second part of the concert was devoted to the Symphony No. 3, the “Rhenish,” by Robert Schumann. This splendid work was inspired by observation of life along the Rhine River.

It is unusual in being written in five movements, not the conventional four. (Oddly, their individual markings were not printed in the program, but conductor Steve Kurr (below) gave a clever spoken introduction that outlined the score for the audience.)

This is a very extroverted work, calling for a lot of orchestral sonority. I suspect that a little more rehearsal time would have helped the avoidance of some blemishes: rapid passages, especially in the first movement, were roughly articulated, and there were some tiny gaffes all along.

But the players were devoted in responding to maestro Kurr’s rather propulsive tempos. This score gives a lot to do particularly to the horn section, which played with ardent splendor.

As always, then, the MCO earned further laurels for presenting this very adventurous program.

Posted in Classical music
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Classical music: The FREE one-hour, monthly midday concert series “Just Bach” debuts with excellent playing and outstanding singing as well as practical problems such as downtown parking and timing

October 1, 2018
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By Jacob Stockinger

By John W. Barker

Marika Fischer Hoyt is becoming ever more ubiquitous, not only as a performing violist in orchestral, string quartet and period-instrument ensembles, but also as organizer of musical activities, especially as devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (below).

Hoyt (below) has already revived the annual “Bach around the Clock” spectacular each spring to mark Bach’s birthday, but now she has established a monthly series of FREE midday concerts at Luther Memorial Church called “Just Bach.”

The first of this series was held last Thursday afternoon, Sept. 27, at 1 p.m. in the church sanctuary at 1021 University Avenue. Ten musicians participated.

The singers were UW-Madison alumna Sarah Brailey, soprano (below); mezzo-soprano Cheryl Bensman Rowe; tenor Wesley Dunnagan; UW-Madison bass-baritone Paul Rowe.

The players were Kangwon Lee Kim and Leanne League, violins; Fischer Hoyt, viola; James Waldo, cello; and Luke Conklin, oboe. All played on period instruments, with Mark Brampton Smith playing the organ.

The hour-long program offered Bach’s “Little” Organ Fugue in G minor, and two full cantatas: BWV 165, “O heiliges Geist- und Wasserbad” (O Bath of Holy Spirit and Water) for Trinity, and BWV 32, “Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen” (Dearest Jesus, My Desire), a dialogue cantata. (You can hear the opening aria of Cantata BWV 32 in the YouTube video at the bottom.)

Both set the type of Pietistic Lutheran German texts standard for such church compositions of the day, and each built around pairs of arias and recitatives for different solo singers.

BWV 32, which adds an oboist (below, second from right) to the string players in some of the movements, is particularly interesting in representing a series of exchanges between the Soul (Seele) and Jesus Himself, culminating in direct duos between them.

Each cantata ends with a harmonization of a traditional Lutheran chorale. In the spirit of the program’s venue, the audience was asked to sing them, in German, from prepared sheets. In these, and in an English hymn from this church’s hymnal, the audience was prepped by Brailey, who served as general hostess.

In purely musical terms, the performances were really excellent, with both vocalists and instrumental players of established talents. And certainly the very atmosphere of a church setting evoked the composer’s original purposes. (The church’s ample acoustics enriched the musical performances, though they badly undermined spoken material on the microphone.)

Previously, the Madison Bach Musicians has been a rare group giving us specimens of the generally neglected cantatas, but now this “Just Bach” series will augment the works’ availability.

Subsequent concerts in this series will be switched to 1 p.m. on WEDNESDAY afternoons on Oct. 31, Nov. 28 and Dec. 12.

For more background, including the addresses of Facebook and Instagram sites of “Just Bach,” go to:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/classical-music-just-bach-a-monthly-mid-day-free-concert-series-starts-this-thursday-at-1-p-m-in-luther-memorial-church/

But prospective attendees should be warned of practical problems. The early afternoon time is difficult for most people, there is no parking facility, and access to the venue will likely be limited to those already in the vicinity.

For all that, I reckoned some 40 or so people in the audience – with no one eating lunch, even thought that is permitted. So artistic merits might still surmount obstacles.

Posted in Classical music
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