The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Oakwood Chamber Players take a “Journey” to explore neglected and oppressed German and Dutch composers this Saturday night and Sunday afternoon
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By Jacob Stockinger
The accomplished and acclaimed Oakwood Chamber Players (below) continue their exploration of neglected repertoire and end their “Journey” season with two performances of a concert titled Legacy on this Saturday night, May 19, at 7 p.m. and on Sunday afternoon, May 20, at 2 p.m.
The concerts will be held at the Oakwood Center for Arts and Education, 6209 Mineral Point Road, on Madison’s far west side near West Towne Mall.
Tickets can be purchased with cash or personal checks at the door: $25 general admission, $20 seniors and $5 students. Visit www.oakwoodchamberplayers.com for more information.
Trio for flute, clarinet and bassoon by Dutch composer Julius Röntgen (below) was written in 1917 and is neo-Classical in style. Röntgen was a classmate and lifelong friend of Edvard Grieg’s whom he met at the Leipzig Conservatory. He studied with Lachner and Reinecke, and collaborated with Brahms and Casals in concerts. His musical career spanned the roles of composer, teacher, and concert pianist. He was instrumental in the founding of the Amsterdam Conservatory and the world-famous Concertgebouw Orchestra.
A frequent participant in chamber music himself, he was a fine contributor to the genre. Röntgen’s Wind Trio in G Major shows his compositional facility: from a playful Haydn-influenced first movement (which you can hear in the YouTube video at the bottom) to an adagio melody in the second movement that is drawn from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” and to the final movement with a Danish folk melody at its heart that is enhanced by upbeat creative variations.
German composer Heinrich Kaminski (below) wrote his atmospheric String Quartet in F major. Written over the time period leading up to World War I, this four-movement piece encompasses moodiness contrasted with high energy. The scherzo movement has the feel of a driven dance, the adagio movement is emotionally charged, and Kaminski’s final movement recaps themes of the piece’s restless expressivity.
Recognition of his talent in Berlin was cut short when the Nazi Gestapo intercepted correspondence that revealed Jewish heritage. His music was deemed unsuitable for performance in Germany and banned in 1937. He fled to Switzerland yet his life was profoundly impacted by events. He died shortly after the war, having endured the dissolution of his marriage, declining health and loss of children. However interest in Kaminski’s unique composition style has led to resurgence in recent performances of his works.
Dutch composer Leo Smit (below) studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory and then lived in Paris for a decade before returning to Holland. He was greatly influenced by Ravel and Stravinsky’s innovations and exchanged ideas with fellow composers Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger. He enjoyed jazz rhythms and they often are found in his works.
His three-movement Sextet for piano and wind quintet is full of variety, warm melodic lines and fascinating harmonies. With the German invasion during World War II Smit’s circumstances as a Jewish musician deteriorated and he was forbidden to continue as a professional musician. Despite the dire circumstances he continued composing, completing a Sonata for flute and piano in 1943 just prior to his transportation to and death in a concentration camp.
The program ends with a cleverly written piece by German composer Bernhard Sekles (below). The final movement from his Capriccio for violin, cello and piano is titled Yankee-Doodle with variations and a delightful way to conclude the concert. Based in Frankfurt, Sekles was an innovative composer and teacher, and in 1928 became the first European teacher of jazz.
Oakwood Chamber Players members are Marilyn Chohaney, flute; Amanda Szczys, bassoon; Anne Aley, horn; Leyla Sanyer, violin; and Maggie Darby Townsend, cello. They will be joined by guests Martha Fischer, piano; Elspeth Stalter-Clouse, violin; Shannon Farley, viola; Aaron Hill, oboe; and Bernard Parish, clarinet.
The Oakwood Chamber Players are a group of Madison-area professional musicians who play in other professional organizations such as the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, and who have rehearsed and performed at Oakwood Village for over 30 years.
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The Oakwood Chamber Players are a professional music ensemble proudly supported by Oakwood Lutheran Senior Ministries and the Oakwood Foundation.
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Classical music: The amateur and accomplished Middleton Community Orchestra and guest cellist Andrew Briggs perform music by Dvorak and Mendelssohn this Wednesday night.
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By Jacob Stockinger
On this Wednesday night, Feb. 24, the mostly amateur and very accomplished Middleton Community Orchestra (below top) will present the Winter Concert of its fifth anniversary season.
The concert will feature cellist Andrew Briggs (below) as soloist in the famously tuneful and dramatic Cello Concerto by Antonin Dvorak. (You can hear the opening that hooks you at once, played by superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, in a YouTube video at the bottom.)
Also on the program, to be conducted by Steve Kurr (below) are two works by Felix Mendelssohn: the Hebrides Overture and the Symphony No. 3 “Scottish.”
The concert is at 7:30 p.m. in the Middleton Performing Arts Center (below) that is attached to Middleton High School, 2100 Bristol Street. General admission is $10. All students are admitted free of charge. The box office and doors open at 7 p.m. For information call 608 212-8690.
A meet-and-greet informal reception (below) for the public and the musicians takes place after the concert.
For more information about the Middleton Community Orchestra and its remaining concerts this season as well as how to join it – there are openings now in the string section — and support it, visit:
http://middletoncommunityorchestra.org
Here is some biographical information about the talented local soloist:
Cellist Andrew Briggs performs on an international scale, from giving recitals in his native Colorado to performing concerts in Italy and the UK. His travels have taken him to a growing list of prestigious music festivals, including the International Holland Music Sessions (NL), the Abbey Fontfroide Masterclasses (FR), and as a Fellow of the Aspen Music Festival (US).
Recently moving to Madison from New York City, Andrew has performed in venues such as Alice Tully Hall (NY), the Guggenheim Museum, and Macky Auditorium (CO).
Briggs’ 2015-2016 season includes both solo and chamber engagements. Recent recitals include solo programs at the Remonstranse Kerke in Alkmaar, Netherlands; the Abbey Fontfroide in Narbonne, France; Morphy Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and on the Sunday Recital Series at West Middleton Lutheran Church in Wisconsin.
Briggs is also a part of UW-Madison’s Hunt Quartet, a graduate string quartet that will give a recital in early March.
A dedicated performer of all eras of music, Briggs plays music from Baroque to contemporary. Studying Baroque cello with Phoebe Carrai at the Juilliard School, Andrew most recently performed with the Madison Bach Musicians and as a continuo cellist for University of Wisconsin-Madison’s opera production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).
Briggs also enjoys playing music of contemporary composers, most recently playing with New Muse Ensemble and Domaine Musicale of Madison, Wisconsin. At Juilliard, he performed chamber music works of contemporary composers in the FOCUS! Contemporary Music Festival, ChamberFest, and with Axiom Ensemble.
You can learn more by visiting:
Tags: Alice Tully Hall, amateur, Andrew Briggs, Arts, Aspen Music Festival, Axiom Ensemble, Baroque, Beethoven, Cello, Chamber music, Classical music, Colorado, concerto, Contemporary classical music, Dvorak, England, France, Great Britain, Guggenheim Museum, Hebrides, Holland, Italy, Jacob Stockinger, Juilliard School, Los Angeles, Madison, Madison Bach Musicians, Marriage of Figaro, Mendelssohn, Middleton Community Orchestra, Mozart, Netherlands, New Music, New York City, opera, Orchestra, Overture, Scotland, Sonata, String quartet, UK, United Kingdom, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University Opera, Viola, Violin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Yo-Yo Ma, YouTube
Classical music: Early music and period-instrument pioneer Frans Bruggen dies at 79. And American media don’t care.
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By Jacob Stockinger
He wasn’t a maestro in the usual sense.
But he surely was a master.
He was a master, even though he never seemed temperamental and never received the kind of acclaim and press that typical orchestral conductors or maestros receive -– from Arturo Toscanini through Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan to Gustavo Dudamel.
He was Frans Bruggen (below). He was Dutch and a fantastic player of the flute and the recorder. He died this past Wednesday at 79 after a long illness.
But he became a pioneer conductor of early music and period instrument authenticity, adopting historically informed performance practices even from the Baroque period, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi into the Classical and early Romantic periods.
As a flutist and recorder player, Bruggen was a prodigy who often performed with Dutch colleagues in the early music movement, including harpsichord master Gustav Leonhardt and cellist Anner Bylsma.
He founded the Orchestra of the 18th Century, but also went on to conduct major mainstream orchestras and to teach at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley,
I loved his performances of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Joseph Haydn, of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert.
Even as I write this, I am playing Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony from Bruggen’s set of Haydn’s minor-key, proto-Romantic “Storm-and-Stress” symphonies.
What I especially liked was the expressiveness he often brought to an early music movement that sometimes seemed mechanical or robotic in its early days. Bruggen brought subtlety and emotional connection.
In Brugen’s hands, early music sounded natural, never forced into iconoclastic phrasing or rushed tempi, as it can with Reinhold Goebel and Concerto Koln or Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Bruggen’s performances never sounded deliberately goofy or self-serving. (Below is Frans Bruggen conducting.)
Bruggen must have made his case persuasively. Nowadays, most early music groups also sound more expressive and subjective, not so doctrinaire, dogmatic or orthodox in their approaches.
Bruggen seemed a low-key and modest man and musician, qualities that The Ear identifies with the Dutch, including Bruggen’s own more famous conducting colleague Bernard Haitink.
The Ear hopes that Bruggen’s death brings about many reissues of his prolific discography with more high-profile publicity. His Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven symphonies are, unfortunately, largely now out of print.
Here are some links to obituaries that tell his story:
Here is a link to The Guardian, which also lists Bruggen’s five greatest contributions to early music:
Here is a story from the BBC Music Magazine:
http://www.classical-music.com/news/frans-brüggen-1934-2014
Here is a great piece from The Telegraph, also in the United Kingdom:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11034321/Frans-Bruggen-obituary.html
Curiously, it probably says something about Bruggen that I could find many obituaries from Europe and the UK, but none from the U.S., not even at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or NPR (National Public Radio).
Here is a YouTube video of Frans Bruggen, who served both composers and audiences so well, in action, playing a solo fantasy for recorder by Georg Philipp Telemann. In every way it seems a fitting tribute or homage on the occasion of his death:
Tags: Anner Bylsma, Arts, Arturo Toscanini, Bach, Baroque, Beethoven, Bernard Haitinck, Bernard Haitink, Chamber music, Classical era, Classical music, Compact Disc, Dutch, Early music, flute, Frans Bruggen, Franz Schubert, Georg Philipp Telemann, George Frideric Handel, Goebel, Gustav Leonhardt, Gustavo Dudamel, Handel, Harnoncourt, Herbert von Karajan, Holland, Jacob Stockinger, Johann Sebastian Bach, Leonard Bernstein, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mozart, Music, Netherlands, New York Times, NPR, Orchestra of the 18th Century, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Rameau, recorder, Romantic music, Schubert, Telemann, United Kingdom, Vivaldi, YouTube
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