The Well-Tempered Ear
November’s “Just Bach” FREE online concert is this Wednesday morning at 8 instead of noon. It features two favorites: “Air on the G String” and the Concerto for Two Violins
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This Wednesday, Just Bach again shares the timeless beauty of the music by Johann Sebastian Bach (below) from their home in the nave of Luther Memorial Church (LCM), 1021 University Avenue.
The group participates in LMC’s weekly ‘Music at Midday’ concert series at https://www.luthermem.org/music-at-midday. (Please note: Now that the concerts are online instead of in person, the videos will be posted early Wednesday mornings at 8 a.m., instead of at noon. They will remain online indefinitely so viewers can see them at their convenience.).
As part of this series, Just Bach concerts take place on the third Wednesday of each month. Remaining concerts are: Nov. 18, Dec. 16, Jan. 20, Feb. 17, March 17, April 21 and May 19. The programs last approximately 30 minutes.
It is still too risky to have in-person audiences. So in addition to the Luther Memorial website, they will be posted on:
The Just Bach home website at: https://justbach.org/concerts/
The Just Bach Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/JustBachSeries
And the Just Bach YouTube Channel, where previous concerts are still posted, at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcyVFEVsJwklHAx9riqSkXQ
Viewing the concerts is FREE, but the group asks those who are able, to help pay the musicians with tax-deductible donations at: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7A4R7CA8VDRMG&source=url
PLEASE NOTE: New this month will be a half-hour live ZOOM post-concert reception on this Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. CST. Those who would like to join us and chat with the performers can follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87144868956?pwd=aHUrR3BNZFF5Y1hlVG1EWkNvMklkQT09
The November concert opens with Just Bach co-founder, UW graduate student and nationally concertizing soprano Sarah Brailey (below), who will provide welcoming remarks and an overview of the program.
Our guest artists this month (below, in a photo by Barry Lewis) are a quartet of string players from the Madison Symphony Orchestra: violinists Leanne League and Xavier Pleindoux; violist Marika Fischer Hoyt; and cellist Lindsey Crabb. Also performing is harpsichordist John Chappell Stowe, a professor in the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music. Dave Parminter is the videographer.
League and Pleindoux (below, in a photo by Barry Lewis) will play the solo parts in the familiar and beautiful Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins (the ‘Bach Double’), BWV 1043.
Madison Symphony Orchestra audiences will remember their gorgeous performance of this piece at a Christmas Spectacular concert a couple of years back. (You can hear the beautiful and poignant slow movement in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
The ensemble will continue with a movement from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068, the serenely transcendent “Air on a G String.”
Sarah Brailey returns to lead the final chorale from Cantata 139, composed for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity, which happens to be this coming Sunday. The stirring title, Dahero Trotz der Höllen Heer! translates as “Therefore Defiance to the Host of Hell.”
We encourage viewers to sing along by following the chorale sheet music, which will be displayed on the screen, as Stowe accompanies on the organ.
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Classical music: NPR explores musical responses to epidemics and pandemics from The Black Plague through HIV-AIDS and COVID-19. Do you know of any more?
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By Jacob Stockinger
For many centuries, artists of all kinds have responded to major social catastrophes or crises. (Below is “The Dance of Death” from the Wellcome Library in London).
Musicians and composers are among them.
Many musicians are now performing and then live streaming music in their homes because of the need for self-isolation and quarantining or social distancing.
But here we are talking about composers who tried to translate the tragedy of sickness into sound.
So it is with the coronavirus and COVID-19.
But the writer puts in it in a context that transforms it into a kind of tradition.
Tom Huizenga, who writes for the “Deceptive Cadence” blog of NPR (National Public Radio), also provides audio samples of the work he is discussing.
He starts with The Black Plague of the 14th century and British composer John Cooke (below), who wrote a hymn to the Virgin Mary.
He offers an example of how Johann Sebastian Bach (below), who suffered his own tragedies, responded to a later plague in France in one of his early cantatas.
The story covers the HIV-AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and how both the disease and the government’s slow response to it inspired a symphony by the American composer John Corigliano (below).
The survey concludes with a contemporary American composer, Lisa Bielawa (below), who is in the process of composing a choral work that responds to the coronavirus pandemic.
Here is a link to the NPR story, which you can read and or else spend seven minutes listening to, along with the audio excerpts of the works that have been discussed.
Here is a link: https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2020/04/13/827990753/when-pandemics-arise-composers-carry-on
What do you think of the story?
Do you know of other composers or musical works that responded to epidemics, pandemics and other public health crises?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: The Willy Street Chamber Players conclude this summer season on such a high note that one already hungers for next summer
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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.
By John W. Barker
At Immanuel Lutheran Church last Friday night, the Willy Street Chamber Players ended the 2018 summer season – their fourth — with a concert full of fascinating variety.
Four works were performed, each introduced by one of the players. Personnel shifted according to the scorings.
To begin, a core group of the organization (below, from left) — violinists Eleanor Bartsch and Paran Amirinazari, cellists Lindsay Crabb and Mark Bridges, and violist Beth Larson — played Luigi Boccherini’s Cello Quintet in C major (G. 324), which has the Italian title translatable as “Night Music of the Streets of Madrid.” (The piece, which has military or martial aspects to it, was featured in the soundtrack to the popular film “Master and Commander,” which you can hear in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Typical of the composer’s prolific writing for string quintets, it is unique in offering in its seven movements a dusk-to-dawn evocation of Madrid’s street life in Boccherini’s day. This delightful work was performed with relish.
Next came a contemporary work by American composer Andrew Norman (below top). Written in his 20s, Night Screens (2002),for flute and string quartet, is a playful work inspired by the asymmetrical stained glass windows designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
The music is quite tonal, but very episodic in its succession of tempos and rhythms. For this work, Amirinazari, Larson and Crabb were joined by a friend of the composer, flutist Timothy Hagen (below), now a faculty member of the UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music.
Rarely heard in concert, but a really fascinating novelty is Sergei Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, Op. 34. This was composed in 1919, during the composer’s stay in the U.S. It is based on two melodies whose actual Jewish origins are in doubt, but their juxtaposition and elaboration are fascinating to follow.
The colorful scoring is for clarinet, piano, and string quartet, so this drew other guest artists, Alicia Lee (below top) also of the UW faculty, and pianist Thomas Kasdorf (below bottom) to join Bartsch, Amirinazari, Larson and Bridges.
Finally came a rare opportunity to encounter Johann Strauss II collaborating with Arnold Schoenberg, or rather vice-versa. For a fund-raising concert on behalf of his radical atonal ensemble in Vienna in 1925, Schoenberg made a chamber arrangement of the great waltz master’s Kaiser-Walzer or “Emperor Waltz.”
He scored it for flute, clarinet, piano and string quartet — perfectly allowing seven of the eight performers (less Crabb) to offer a triumphant grand finale. Even in such a lean and reduced format, Schoenberg faithfully conveyed Strauss’s melodic genius, and brought the large audience enthusiastically to its feet.
The Willys continue to match great enterprise in programming with superb artistry in playing, all in a summer season that leaves us hungering for the next one.
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Classical music: Opera supertitles turn 35 and will help audiences this coming weekend at the University Opera’s three performances of “La Bohème.” Plus UW percussionists perform new music Tuesday night
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ALERT: On this Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall. the UW-Madison Western Percussion Ensemble will perform a FREE concert with new works by eight student composers — six from the percussion ensemble and two from the composition department.
By Jacob Stockinger
February is proving to be Opera Month in Madison.
Just over a week ago, the Madison Opera staged its production of “The Abduction From the Seraglio” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
This Friday night at 7:30 p.m., Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m., in Shannon Hall of the Wisconsin Union Theater, the University Opera will stage its production of what is certainly the most popular opera in the repertoire: “La Bohème” by Puccini.
For more information about the production of “La Bohème,” including staging information, the cast and tickets ($10-$38), go to:
https://union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/la-boheme/#additional
https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/university-opera-puccinis-la-boheme2-23/
In both cases, English supertitles (below) were used. For Mozart, they translated German. This weekend they will make the Italian-language production, set in Paris in the 1930s, much more accessible.
Today we take them for granted, even in English language productions where you can’t always understand the words because of the singing.
Occasionally, they prove frustrating because they fall behind the singing or skip repeated passages or black out or even have a howler of a mistranslation.
But by and large, supertitles seem so normal and natural these days, so standard and so much easier than gazing in the dark at translations of the libretto in small type.
They were first used in 1983 by the Canadian Opera Company’s production in Toronto of “Elektra” (below) by Richard Strauss.”
Audiences loved them, and supertitles help to explain the subsequent popularity of opera.
Yet in the early days supertitles faced a major struggle, largely waged by purists, before they were widely accepted. Now they seem indispensable.
That’s all the more reason, then, to read or listen to the background story that recently appeared on National Public Radio (NPR) about the 35th anniversary of supertitles.
Here is a link:
Do you support or oppose the use of supertitles?
Do you like them and find them helpful?
Would you be less likely to attend an opera without supertitles?
Please put any reaction or observations in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
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