Welcome to Lully's World via Brandywine Baroque

By Christine Facciolo
Jean Baptiste de Lully’s death is legendary among musicians: While beating time on a staff during a performance of his Te Deum in 1687, he suffered a fatal injury. The wound he suffered to his foot developed gangrene. Three months later on March 22, Lully died.

Lully’s music did not die that day, though. His stylistic monopoly remained secure for decades after his death. His influence in the writing of opera led to a century of French opera in his style. The two-part “French Overture” he invented spread across Europe, influencing both Bach and Handel.

Brandywine Baroque paid tribute to that legacy by “Celebrating the World of Lully” on Sunday, February 21, at The Barn at Flintwoods. The ensemble included harpsichordists Karen Flint and Joyce Chen, violinists Mark Davids and Mandy Wolman, flutist Eileen Grycky, gambists John Mark Rozendaal and Donna Fournier and soprano Laura Heimes.

The major work of the program was Francois Couperin’s L’Apotheose de Lully, in which the composer portrays the ascent to Parnassus of his predecessors, Lully and Corelli. Apart from being intended as a compliment to the two composers, one might also view this work as an attempt to settle the debate raging in the musical world over the conflicting merits of the French and Italian styles.

This is indeed music with a history (and some humor) as little Italianate gestures recall that Lully, the quintessential French composer was himself Italian-born. The desired rapprochement occurs when Lully and Corelli meet on Parnassus and are persuaded by Apollo that a union of their respective styles would amount to nothing less than unparalleled musical perfection.

The music is indeed wonderful. The combination of violins, keyboard, flute and viol da gamba gave the impression that no other group of instruments could be more fitting. The performance was easy on the ears, luxurious yet intimate.

While the program did not feature a work by Lully himself, it did include a selection from Deuxieme Suite a 3 violes, Livre 4 by his student virtuoso violist Marin Marais, who also served in the court of Louis XIV. Gambists John Mark Rozendaal and Donna Fournier excelled in this contrapuntal work representing the peak of the established French musical tradition.

The richness and splendor of French Baroque sacred music — at times gravely somber and spectacularly exuberant — was amply demonstrated in Pierre Bouteiller’s motet O felix et dilecte conviva and Rene Drouard de Bousset’s Abraham, a rare example of a cantata spirituelle so popular in the late court of Louis XIV. Laura Heimes’s crystalline and precise soprano blended beautifully with the instrumentalists in both works.

Italian composers and those writing in the Italian style were equally well-represented. Martin Davids’ violin was crisp and decisive in his rendering of the relatively obscure Francois Francoeur’s I Sonata No. V in A minor. Supporting him were Joyce Chen on harpsichord and Donna Fournier on viola da gamba.

Davids, Wolman and Rozendaal reveled in the playfulness of Tarquinio Merula’s vibrant and imaginative version of the Ciaccona, a dance form that migrated to Italy from Mexico in 1615.

No Baroque program would be complete without a selection by the prolific Georg Philipp Telemann and this concert was no exception. The note-filled Quartet in G major is a perfect display of this polyglot composer’s “mixed taste” style of writing, with its French, German, Italian and Polish influences. The ensemble’s playing — with Grycky as flute soloist — was both energetic and vibrant while deftly weaving together the mixed tastes of this composition.

See www.brandywinebaroque.org.

Women Composers Take Over the Evening at The Music School of Delaware

By Christine Facciolo
For centuries, women composers were little more than a footnote in music history. Considered a novelty, their work rarely left the confines of the drawing room or recital parlor, if they got performed at all. Even the celebrated pianist Clara Wieck Schumann felt compelled to fill her programs with the works of her husband or their friend Johannes Brahms rather than her own.

So it was only fitting that a program honoring women composers open with one of Wieck Schumann’s own compositions, the Scherzo No. 2 in C minor (1845). The little sonic gem received an expansive and probing interpretation from Holly Roadfeldt Wednesday, February 17 at The Music School of Delaware in Wilmington.

The concert, which benefitted the Anthony G. Simmons Scholarship Fund and other scholarships, served to encourage young female musicians by emphasizing the works of living women composers. Roadfeldt remembered her disappointment at hearing one of her students say she felt she could not pursue composition because she was a woman.

Roadfeldt’s muscularity and poetic power were on fine display in three of the four pieces from Joan Tower’s No Longer Very Clear collection. Her fingers never stopped from the moment she placed them on the keyboard for Or Like a…an Engine (1994). Think Ondine from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. The second piece, Vast Antique Cubes (2000), gave Roadfeldt the opportunity to play in legato before tackling Throbbing Still (2000), Tower’s recollection of the rhythms she experienced growing up in South America. Think Inca Empire meets Stravinsky.

The Serafin String Quartet offered two works by Julia Adolphe. Just twenty-eight years old, Adolphe, a doctoral student in music composition at the University of Southern California, has already achieved considerable success. In 2014 she became one of three young composers chosen to have their work performed by the New York Philharmonic. She is now working on a commission from the Phil, a viola concerto for its principal violist.

Serafin and Adolphe share a passion for exploring new musical worlds. Veil of Leaves (2014) shows Adolphe’s potential for becoming a premier composer for this most intimate of forms. The work begins with the strings in unison but continuously diverges and converges in a swirl of pitch and texture. This is a piece that demands not only supreme musicianship but deep concentration which was etched on the players’ faces.

Between the Accidental (2010) engaged the quartet in a contrapuntal tour de force, juxtaposing jarring dissonances with modal melodies in a netherworld of tonality.

Roadfeldt took the stage again to perform two works by Philadelphia-based composer Kala Pierson. Spark (2014) and Flare (2016), the latter of which received its World Premiere at the concert with the composer in attendance. As their names suggest, these works are rhythmically fluid and vividly expressive — perfectly suited to Roadfeldt’s flair for intensity and meditative focus.

Pianist Jennifer Campbell appeared as both performer and composer, offering Perceptions of Shadows, a work she wrote in 2013. This is an intensely introspective piece, showing that as shadows change with time, so do our perceptions of life’s struggles. This work proves that Campbell is not only an acclaimed pianist but a composer of great insight and sensitivity.

Campbell joined forces with violist Esme Allen-Creighton for a first-rate performance of Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata for Viola and Piano. This work written in 1919 is packed with big-hearted melodies and delicate colors. It’s hard to fathom how and why it missed winning first place in competition and why it doesn’t get more outings than it does.

Allen-Creighton brought together all the right elements — robust sound, free-flowing legato lines, unbridled lyricism as well as a technically assured presentation — to make us want to hear more from an instrument that continues to play, well, second fiddle to the violin. Campbell supplied the virtuosic pianistic accompaniment which was as demanding as any concerto.

See www.musicschoolofdelaware.org.

Mélomanie Delivered Musical Treats for Wilmington Valentines

Mélomanie performed at The Delaware Contemporary on Feb. 14.

By Christine Facciolo
Music lovers who braved Sunday’s frigid temps got treated to a concert of sweet musical morsels from Mélomanie.

The program was an eclectic one, featuring the works of the definitely Baroque Telemann, the stylistically fluid Ibert and neo-Baroque contemporary Kile Smith.

The program featured a reprise performance of Smith’s The Nobility of Women, which was commissioned by Mélomanie and premiered in 2012. Mélomanie Co-Artistic Director Tracy Richardson commented that the ensemble gave Smith the choice of an additional instrument to be played by a guest artist. He chose the oboe — an instrument not uncoincidentally played by his daughter, Priscilla Herreid. Herreid reprised her role as guest soloist for this concert.

Smith’s composition proves that musical styles never really disappear, they just go out of fashion until inspiration or musical necessity spark their resurrection. Smith took his cue for this eight-movement work from the name of the 16th Century dance manual Nobilita di Dame by Fabritia Caroso. Each movement bears the name of a Baroque dance form: Allemande, Sarabande, Musette, Ciaccona.

The work is a pretty staid affair until Richardson breaks out with a dazzling harpsichord solo in the third movement. Herreid did herself proud, soloing in the Sarabande, which features a delicate italianate melody of great beauty. The Ciaccona served as a fitting finale, packed with interesting flourishes.

Smith’s work paired quite nicely with Telemann’s Quartet in G Major from the “Tafelmusik” collection. “Tafelmusik” — literally meaning table music — is a mid-16th Century term for music played at banquets. Mélomanie imbued the piece with a vigor and flourish that would compel anyone to put down their fork and defer to the music.

The program also featured the Two Interludes for flute, violin and harpsichord by 20th Century French composer, Jacques Ibert. The first interlude was slow and stately, in triple meter, reminiscent of a Baroque sarabande. The second was fast with swirls of color and a Spanish flavor thanks to inflections of the Phrygian mode. Both pieces were rich in tone yet balanced a perfection union of lushness of Impressionism and the clarity of Classicism. Flutist Kimberly Reighley, violinist Christof Richter and harpsichordist Richardson strike the perfect balance between lushness and clarity of tone and texture.

Rounding out the program were selections by two all-but-forgotten French composers: Louis-Antoine Dornel, a contemporary of J.S. Bach and Benoit Guilemant, an 18th Century flutist.

Herreid once again showed her mastery of the Baroque oboe — a notoriously difficult beast to tame — in the former’s Sonata n G Major, which featured a lively interplay between soloist and bass.

Cellist Douglas McNames and gambist Donna Fournier — this time on cello collaborated on a lively performance of the latter’s melodic Sonata No. 4 in C Major, Op. 3.

See www.melomanie.org.