Time travel with Brandywine Baroque

Karen Flint, the artistic director of Brandywine Baroque goes to great lengths to create an authentic program with period instruments in a room small enough to hear baroque instruments, yet large enough to hold about one hundred people. That alone is reason to attend a concert at the Barn at Flintwoods.


Martin Davids and Edwin Huizinga, violins in rehearsal



The minute you sit down, you have the feeling you have travelled in time back to the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is impossible to resist looking at the brilliant colors and detail on the lid, soundboard and edge of the virginal which was the star of the concert. The virginal is actually a one-year-old reproduction by John Phillips, but that does not in any way dilute the intense feeling that you have travelled back in time.

When Ms. Flint started the concert with a solo piece from Elizabeth Rogers’ Virginal Book published in 1657, I was transported to another era. The rich tones and astounding depth of sound from the tiny decorative keyboard instrument were a great surprise. Ms. Flint has an ease of mastery and feel for the keyboard.

The two gamba players, John Mark Rozendaal and Donna Fournier, two violinists playing viol parts, Martin Davids and Edwin Huizinga played both chamber pieces - some of which were wildly complex. A fantasia in c minor by William Lawes was an extremely complex contrapuntal piece which had eccentrically interpolated rhythms.


Donna Fournier and John Mark Rozendaal gambas



Laura Heimes, soprano and Tony Boutté, tenor sing baroque styles with such purity and clarity and have such technical mastery of the style that they are able to really portray a song with gesture, humor and grace. Ms. Heimes’ singing is always delightful, but when she sings baroque music, her vocal line is pure and simple with minimal vibrato and magical ease on the high notes.



Each of the performers seemed to exude a playfulness and joy in the music that made the entire concert a pleasure. The physical expressions of all the players and singers and their ability to truly touch another style and time made this a moving experience. And the program itself was so beautifully written and researched by Ms. Flint that it became a great ready reference tool for those of us who did not know about the instruments.

 

After the concert, Ms. Flint was more than ready to show us the instrument and talk about the exquisite illustrations and decorations and where and how it was made.

 

When concerts are that thoroughly prepared, they change your entire perspective on music.

See www.brandywinebaroque.org

Mėlomanie plays at Immanuel Highlands

The Immanuel Episcopal Church, Highlands has begun a Music at Immanuel program featuring a great fall calendar of performances starting with an evening of Mėlomanie. The program featured a world premiere by guitarist/composer Chris Braddock called Grease in the Groove which was a delightful mix of country music and jazzy sounds for mandolin, twelve-string guitar, harpsichord and cello. Doug McNames, cello, took Braddock’s brash bass line and ran with it, creating a fun and almost washtub effect while Tracy Richardson played a series of delicate scales and arpeggios on the harpsichord. Braddock played his mandolin part which he had made the lead voice dominating the trio. Then he switched to the twelve-string guitar against which he created a very high cello part which took over the dominant voice for the end of the piece — evocative of Scheherazade rather than the country style in which the piece began.

Two baroque pieces introduced each half of the program. The Paris Quartet No. 4 in B Minor, TWV 43: h2 featured Chris Braddock playing an additional continuo to Richardson’s harpsichord and the Concerto No. 3 in D Major by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier which featured Eve Friedman (baroque flute) and Priscilla Smith (baroque oboe). Both pieces were lively and light; not at all out of place with the contemporary pieces on the program.

Mėlomanie also presented excerpts of four pieces they had commissioned in the past decade and invited each composer to speak about his or her piece. Not only was it a treat to have the composers be present for the concert, but it was interesting to compare the acoustics in Immanuel to those of Grace Church.

Violinist Christof Richter

Chuck Holdeman said his Quarter note = 48 was written in 5/4 time to make sure there was no recognizable downbeat, but the impeccable coordination between flutist Kim Reighley and cellist Doug McNames made it seem more strictly laid out than he led us to believe. Ingrid Arauco’s Pavane opened with the harpsichord’s sparkling high register and melted into a fugal resolution picked up by the modern flute, gamba, cello and violin. Mark Hagerty’s Trois Rivières excerpt was very jazzy with a 5/8 meter creating a dance feel which he felt was influenced by his time spent in Brazil.



Flutist Kimberly Reighley

The two excerpts from Kile Smith’s The Nobility of Women were brilliantly played by his daughter Priscilla, for whom he wrote the piece. Her baroque oboe sound is so incredibly smooth that the listener might forget it is a double reed instrument – the baroque oboe being more temperamental even than its prima donna modern cousin. The Sarabande is slow and sad and the oboe voice pierces plumbs the darkness with its soulful sound and the Canarios, which featured all of the Mėlomanie players, was written in a traditional baroque style, yet it still evokes a very swinging and modern dance, especially when the oboe is playing long dotted rhythms over the other voices.

Mėlomanie will continue their residence at Grace Church on Washington Street in January.

See www.melomanie.org.

See www.immanuel-highlands.org.

Art IS everywhere in New Castle County, too!!!

Love's Messenger in Brandywine Park

I confess it took us two tries to see all of the pop-up art in New Castle County (a continuation of our Delaware pop-up journey is chronicled in the blog Art is everywhere in Kent and Sussex County), but we had two absolutely gorgeous days in which to view the sights.


The first trip was in the late afternoon – starting from Newark and seeking endlessly on the green (or mall, if you call it that) and discovering John Sloan’s Spring Rain was really on Main Street – mounted on a brick dormitory wall. Not only was it confusing to locate, but I realized that as a Newark resident, I had driven by the outdoor art many times since it was posted.

Then a quick trip to New Castle to see Edward Moran’s Standing Out – a mighty war ship poised in front of the Court House Museum, where you can see the Delaware River flowing just down the street and imagine the ship sailing on it. Right beside the picture, one of our favorite Sunday Coop Market veggie vendors was letting his great display of eggplant, apples and okra lure people in. One of us yielded to the apples.

A trip to Crabby Dick’s let us see Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Lady Lilith taught me about the first wife of Adam, Lilith. That was not anything I had remembered from Sunday school. Of course, after posing with beautiful Lilith, we just had to have supper at Crabby Dick’s – indoors looking out the window towards Pea Patch Island. Thus endeth our first New Castle County pop-up run.

The second trip was also a beautiful day. We met at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts where we had just been to a concert. Walking from the DCCA to the Riverfront took us directly to Howard Pyle’s Attack on a galleon which had itself been attacked – robbed of its sign! We penciled in the proper title for the record and sped off to the Grand Opera House to see Romeo and Juliet by Ford Maddox Brown where we found a young family looking at Tom Maloney’s great statue. We began to stare at the painting and had a great discussion with the family.

Two more stops: the Jasper Crane Rose Garden in Brandywine Park had Love’s Messenger by Marie Spartali Spillman. The painting has a beautiful Pre-Raphaelite model feeding a pigeon and looking towards a river through a window and the Brandywine flowed right behind the picture’s window. Beautiful weather, roses, art, sigh.

When we sought out Howard Pyle’s Marooned, we were surprised that we had to go into the pub and onto their terrace to actually see the work, which is large and quite striking. But somehow, placing a large work between tables and umbrellas on a pub terrace seemed strange.

Milking Time at the Woodside Farm Creamery

Afterwards, we set off for Hockessin to see the very last work on our list: Milking Time by Winslow Homer which was placed on the wall of a barn at the Woodside Creamery. The milkmaid and the farm boy fit in so seamlessly with the cows and barn and fields that one could imagine Mr. Homer painting it after being inspired by Woodside Farm ice cream. We, too, celebrated the completion of our pop-art art tour with a generous serving.

Please do this again, Delaware Art Museum!

 

See www.delart.org.