"A Viennese New Year" at Zilkha Hall on Dec 31

The end of the year is fast approaching, and with it the obligatory Christmas shopping, holiday parties, and — most important — big plans for New Year's Eve. On Dec 31 at the Hobby Center, Ars Lyrica offers Houston's classiest New Year's Eve celebration, complete with concert and gala reception to ring in the new year. "A Viennese New Year" features two amazing singers: soprano Lauren Snouffer and countertenor John Holiday plus the Ars Lyrica ensemble in festive music by composers from the Viennese royal court. Our look at elegant old Vienna — where classical music's celebrations of New Year's Eve began — includes arias and duets by Mozart and Gluck, instrumental works by Fux and Schmeltzer, plus one or two New Year's Eve surprises, including a polka by Johann Strauss! The concert begins at 9 pm in the Hobby Center's intimate Zilkha Hall, and the gala follows in the Sarofim Hall Grand Lobby – a perfect place to mingle, sample the buffet, sip champagne, and pick up that last holiday present for either yourself or a loved one at our annual silent auction.

To purchase tickets for the concert and gala reception, visit Ars Lyrica or call the Hobby Center box office at 713-315-2525. Looking forward to celebrating the new year with Mozart, Strauss, and you!

Ars Lyrica's latest recording — of Domenico Scarlatti's comic intermezzo "La Dirindina" and his chamber cantata "Pur nel sonno" — has just been released on the Sono Luminus label. It can be purchased from Ars Lyrica or from dozens of websites, including Amazon.com. Featured singers include mezzo Jamie Barton, tenor Joseph Gaines, baritone Brian Shircliffe (all in "La Dirindina") and soprano Céline Ricci (in "Pur nel sonno"). The disc also includes two Scarlatti sonatas, arranged for mandolin and harpsichord, which feature lutenist Richard Savino and yours truly on harpsichord.

"La Dirindina" is a musical farce, and like all intermezzi, it’s both comic and compact. The story concerns the wily and but gifted young singer Dirindina and her teacher Don Carissimo, whose interest in his pupil is more than a little untoward. As the curtain goes up, a singing lesson is underway, and it is clear that neither student nor teacher are very interested the day’s lesson plan. Dirindina’s independent spirit and her ability to sing (when she wants to) annoy Don Carissimo, who is further vexed by the appearance of Liscione, a famous castrato who brings some surprising news: the Milan theater wants to engage Dirindina as its prima donna. Don Carissimo flies into a rage, stammering his way through a highly amusing and inventive aria, only to see that his pretty pupil is now flirting openly with the castrato. An obligatory ensemble, with Dirindina and Liscione in musical and dramatic opposition to Don Carissimo, brings Part I to a close.

Part II opens with the unctuous Liscione plying Dirindina with a little minuet, which manages simultaneously to flatter the young singer’s ego while sending up the fashionable but sentimental manners of the aristocracy. Dirindina responds with perhaps the oddest aria in the work, full of syncopations and serpentine melodies that cheekily invoke various bodily fluids, with which she promises to seduce the Milanese public. The ensuing “play within a play,” a mock enactment of the tragic Dido’s rejection of the feckless Aeneas, is witnessed by Don Carissimo, who fails to get the joke and thinks that his ward is not only with child but ready to commit suicide. As with all good comedies, the joke’s on him: the finale is both outrageous and touching, as the capon and the hen are joined in hand by a thoroughly confused old man.

The text of "Pur nel sonno" is delivered from the unlucky suitor’s point of view, and from the outset, the mood is dark: an Introduzione in two parts—something one expects at the head of a full-length opera or oratorio, but rarely in a cantata—is by turns aggressive and pensive. The sinewy first aria introduces a world-weary lover, one rejected by the unattainable Phyllis but unable to forget her, even in sleep; his passion remains sadly one-sided. A highly dramatic recitative follows, as the protagonist’s dream veers from lovely visions to fear and shame. The realization that he’ll never be free again is given full vent in a tour-de-force concluding aria with abundant vocal fireworks.

New harpsichord for St Philip

Just arrived at St Philip Presbyterian Church in Houston, where I play the organ: a new single-manual Flemish-style harpsichord, built for St Philip by John Phillips of Berkeley, CA, after a 1768 instrument by Albert Delin of Tournai. The Delin is an exceptionally versatile historical model, appropriate for a wide range of music in solo and ensemble situations. Its decoration, in particular the painted soundboard with its abundant flora and fauna, is entirely in keeping with the Flemish and French traditions of harpsichord building in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Come hear the inaugural program on the instrument, featuring yours truly and violinist Kurt Johnson on Friday, July 27 at 7:30 pm. St Philip is at 4807 San Felipe, Houston 77056.

Heaven & Hell

Looking forward to "Heaven and Hell," Ars Lyrica's 2011-12 season finale on June 8 and 10 at the Hobby Center. Here are notes on the program, from myself and Catherine Turocy, Artistic Director of the New York Baroque Dance Company, with whom we're collaborating on an all-Monteverdi program. This is not to be missed: an extraordinary opportunity to witness world première stagings of some of Monteverdi's most exceptional works!

Over the course of an exceptionally long career, Claudio Monteverdi composed some 250 madrigals that range from the comic and satirical to the plangent and war-like. This large and diverse repertory, published in some nine books between 1587 and 1651, is the best witness to the composer’s idiosyncratic and constantly evolving ideas about musical composition. Unusually for their time, these madrigals served as neither domestic music nor polyphonic showpieces but instead as highly expressive, supple works in the modern (mixed) style for professional singers. Because an intense focus on the words is this repertory’s hallmark, line-by-line translations will be given as surtitles throughout the performance.

From the Madrigals of Love and War (1638) our program includes four works, two from each half of this singular collection. Love and war are never very far apart in this poetry, thus most of these “madrigals” freely mix the stile concitato, in which instruments and singers simulate the sound of war by repeated hammering of the same notes (which Monteverdi invented), with sections in either the “languid” or the “temperate” styles. As the composer himself explained: “When [the poetry] speaks about war, it must imitate war; when it speaks about peace, imitate peace; about death, death, and so on.” Both halves of the program begin with settings of sonnets, one by Marini the other by Petrarch, and end with dramatized performances two more expansive tales: the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and the Ballo delle Ingrate.

The classic Italian sonnet typically comprises fourteen lines, arranged as pair of four-line strophes and another pair of three-line strophes. In Altri canti di marte and Hor ch’el ciel e la terra, Monteverdi underlines the shift from the first to the second half of each poem by setting them as independent sections. The former begins by juxtaposing Mars (the god of war) and Love, whose struggle is the subject of the first half of this evening’s program. Love, as the second part of Marini’s sonnet reminds us, may “give death to the heart,” but it also “gives life to my song.” By contrast Hor ch’el ciel begins with a whisper, since “heaven, earth, and wind are silent,” only to burst to life as the poet “wakes, thinks, burns, and weeps” with the memory of the beloved. Memory, as it turns out, is the enemy of more than just Petrarch’s muse: it is the eternal companion of the unhappy souls in hell who are the subject of the Ballo delle Ingrate.

First performed during the Venetian Carnival season of 1624 in the presence of the “best and noblest inhabitants of the town,” who “wept and were enraptured at this new style” (or so Monteverdi tells us), the Combattimento is based a portion of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberate (Jerusalem Delivered). Set against the backdrop of the First Crusade, a forbidden love has grown between Tancredi, a Christian knight, and Clorinda, a Muslim maiden-warrior. Disguised as a man, she finds herself cut off from her fellow Saracens, and encounters Tancredi when both are battle-weary. They fight vigorously, disregarding all rules of combat: “rage causes every knightly art to be forgotten,” according to Tasso. It is not clear whether Clorinda has recognized Tancredi, but after two bloody encounters, she begs her opponent to baptize her so that she may die a Christian. As he pulls off her hood, Tancredi recognizes her as his lover and weeps as she dies.

Monteverdi’s audience would have been familiar with the story of Tancredi and Clorinda and would have known of the complex and deep love between the fated couple, who (like Romeo and Juliet) came from warring families. Through its detailed evocation of passion and conflict, this musical “combat” tells a universal story, one magnified by the gestures, attitudes and breath of dancers. The score consists mostly of simple narration; direct speech between the two protagonists is brief. Monteverdi instructs the narrator to pronounce the text clearly and directs that the work should be performed with the actors depicting the story in steps and gestures, with strict observance of tempo, beat, and step in a kind of pantomime. His description of the combat, graphically illustrated in the music, is matched by the actions of dancers who are the doubles of the singing Tancredi and Clorinda in this production. In perhaps the most striking departure from the typical emphasis on vocal text painting in the madrigal genre, most of the pictorial effects in this work come from the instrumental accompaniment.

Il Ballo delle Ingrate (The Ballet of the Ungrateful Ladies), set to a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini, was first performed in Mantua in 1608 as part of the wedding celebrations for Francesco Gonzaga (the son of Monteverdi’s patron Duke Vincenzo) and Margaret of Savoy. Both Vincenzo and Francesco Gonzaga as well as other members of the court took part in the dancing—an odd fact, given that the dance roles seem to be for only women. According to the score, the stage set consists of a Hell’s Mouth (the entrance to the Underworld). Venus and Cupid visit Pluto, King of the Underworld, and complain that Cupid’s arrows are no longer effective on the proud ladies of Mantua, who are scorning their lovers. Cupid asks Pluto to bring the spirits of the ungrateful women who rejected love up from the Underworld to show what fate awaits those who spurn love and marriage. Pluto agrees and the spirits emerge.

The inspiration for the choreography came from Federico Follino, a Mantuan courtier, who gives an eyewitness account of the première. His description of the costumes—“like ashes mixed with flashing sparks; and thus one saw the dresses, and likewise the cloaks (which hung from their shoulders in a very bizarre manner), embroidered with many flames made of silk and gold, so well arranged that everyone judged that they were burning”—combined with his description of the movement suggest a theatrical interpretation after the manner of the morality play. Follino writes that “they did a ballo so beautiful and delightful, with steps, movements and actions now of grief and now of desperation, and now with gestures of pity and now of scorn, sometimes embracing each other as if they had tears of tenderness in their eyes, now striking each other swollen with rage and fury. They were seen from time to time to abhor each other’s sight and to flee each other in frightened manners, and then to follow each other with threatening looks, coming to blows with each other, asking pardon and a thousand other movements, represented with such affect and with such naturalness that the hearts of the onlookers were left so impressed that there was no one in the theater who did not feel his heart move and be disturbed in a thousand ways at the changing of their passions.” (With thanks to Sarah Edgar, dancer/researcher with the NYBDC, who brought this eyewitness account to our attention.) This production, then, acknowledges that Monteverdi and his team were on the cutting edge of a new form of theater based on ancient Greek drama: the Ballo was created one year after L’Orfeo, favola in musica, his first opera.

¬— Matthew Dirst and Catherine Turocy

Festival de Musica Barroca in San Miguel

A number of Ars Lyrica regulars -- including yours truly -- made the trek to beautiful San Miguel de Allende (pictured here) for the annual Festival de Musica Barroca in March. This festival, whose artistic director is our own Barry Sills for the Camerata Ventapane, included two programs with a number of Houston-based musicians, including the Houston Bach Choir. We repeated one of these programs at the Biblioteca Lerdo de Tejada in Mexico City (also pictured here), and did a command performance in Léon for the pope -- who took too much sun that morning and chose to rest instead! Nevermind, the program was much appreciated by a capacity crowd of Catholic prelates and government officials, and we're already planning several performances of Handel's "Acis and Galatea" for next year, in Houston and in Mexico. If you've never been to San Miguel, you should plan on joining us next year for one of the best-kept secrets in the Baroque music world: it's gorgeous, peaceful, and the music-making well worth the trip!

La Resurrezione Program Notes

Ars Lyrica performs Handel's "La Resurrezione" on March 9 (in Houston) and 10 (in Austin). This rarely-heard work, which dates from the composer’s youthful sojourn to Italy, narrates Jesus’ resurrection as witnessed by Mary Magdalene, her companion Mary Cleophas, St John the Apostle, an Angel, and Lucifer himself. Handel’s telling of this tale, which is organized around eight distinct scenes in two large parts, is full of soaring melodies and striking orchestral colors.

Here is a bit of background, from my program notes:

Handel composed La Resurrezione di nostro Signor Gesù Cristo for the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, at whose home the work was first performed in concert in 1708, on Easter evening. Ruspoli, an important patron of the arts and prince of the church, was Handel’s principal employer during the young composer’s residency in the Eternal City. In addition to La Resurrezione, Ruspoli had also commissioned for the same season a passion setting by Alessandro Scarlatti. With multiple performances of both works at the Bonelli Palace in Rome during Holy Week of 1708, one wonders how the good Marquis and his friends found any time to attend services!

Thanks to carefully kept payment records, much is known about the première of La Resurrezione. Though not fully staged, Handel’s oratorio was given in front of painted backdrops that depicted each scene. With the composer in charge, the virtuoso violinist Arcangelo Corelli served as concertmaster for an unusually large orchestra that included a few exotic instruments: the viola da gamba, for example, is featured prominently in several movements. The cast included five of Italy’s finest singers, including Marguerita Durastanti, who created a stir as Mary Magdalene since at that time women were forbidden by papal order from singing in public in Rome; she seems to have been replaced by a castrato in subsequent performances. The roles of the Angel and Mary Cleophas were likewise sung by castrati whose ranges are good match for a modern lyric soprano and alto countertenor, respectively. Some 1500 libretti were printed for at least three performances of the work, something of a record for a new oratorio in Rome at the turn of the century.

One reason why oratorios were so popular in early eighteenth-century Rome is because the genre was effectively opera in disguise: oratorio fulfilled the taste for large-scale dramatic musical works while obeying (at least to the letter of the law) the papacy’s periodic decrees against theatrical entertainments of all sorts, including operas. Performances were given in the grandest Roman houses and palaces, which often had private theaters or rooms large enough to accommodate several hundred spectators. These rooms were often lavishly decorated for oratorio performances and the singers costumed in elaborate operatic garb.

More operatic in nature than Handel’s earlier allegorical oratorio Il trinfo del Tempo, La Resurrezione was a great success from the start. Its characters, from the swaggering Lucifer to the grief-stricken Mary Magdalene, are dramatically conceived and each sings arias in the latest operatic fashion. (Handel in fact re-used several of Resurrezione arias in later operas and oratorios, in one case not changing a single word of text!) The lack of any real choral writing also separates this work from Handel’s later English-language oratorios, in which the chorus is often the most prominent voice. The two choral numbers in La Resurrezione are intended for all the soloists, in the fashion of the “coro” that typically provides closure for Italian Baroque operas.

Bach and Time – New Year's Eve 2011

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup o’kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup,
and surely I’ll buy mine!
And we’ll take a cup o’kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Every New Year’s Eve at midnight, millions of revelers the world over stumble through these famous words by the Scottish bard Robert Burns. Last week in New York, I encountered them under glass (literally, thanks to Pierpont Morgan’s eccentric collecting habits) and marveled again at their universality: they seemed somehow less corny in the original manuscript and earliest prints. Remembering “old times” — more precisely, the unique character of past events, things, and people — is crucial. Without memory, there is no culture.

On New Year's Eve 2011, Ars Lyrica Houston will savor a few of the greatest moments in our collective musical past, with major works by J. S. Bach on the subject of time. Then we party! Please note that our 2011 New Year’s Eve Gala is upstairs in the Grand Lobby of Sarofim Hall, not the Founder’s Club as in previous years. Good luck to all at the silent auction — may everyone win at least a “pint cup,” as Burns’ lyrics suggest!


Bach and Time program:

"Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit," BWV 106

Suite in D Major, BWV 1068

"Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen" (Christmas Oratorio Pt. V), BWV 248/5


Program notes for Bach and Time:

Like most of us, Johann Sebastian Bach understood time to operate in multiple dimensions. His weekly responsibilities as the cantor and chief composer for Leipzig’s principal churches surely made him efficient with his own day-to-day time, since such a position required a new cantata every week. On a more spiritual level, Bach’s orthodox Lutheran milieu also conceived of time within a specifically Christian framework, encompassing everything from creation to eternity. God’s time (to use the locution of BWV 106: “Gottes Zeit”) is eternal, whereas human time is demarcated by salvation history, whose broad outlines are the giving of the Law, the revelation of the Gospels, and the obligation to live a moral life in the here and now.

Bach and his anonymous librettist juxtaposed all these ideas about time to great effect in Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (“God’s is the best time”). An intimation of eternity seems present from the opening notes of the Sonatina, whose archaic scoring for two recorders and two violas da gamba must have struck even its first hearers as an oddly quaint way to set such expressive and modern musical figures. Four singers then take center stage, for a cantata whose various sections announce that God’s time is eternal, that ours is brief, and that belief eventually leads us to a better place.

Unlike later cantatas organized around freestanding recitatives and arias, Cantata 106 looks backwards towards 17th-century models in its seamless shuttling from one kind of musical figure and scoring to another for each sentence or section of text. Given its old-fashioned form and its text, scholars have long assumed that Bach wrote this work for a funeral, most likely in 1707, at the very beginning of his career as a composer of church pieces. Its subtitle, “Actus Tragicus,” suggests a potentially broader purpose as well, in keeping with the German tradition of Trauerspiel or morality plays. Here, the tragedy is that of the human condition, which is overcome only in death through faith.

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is actually a series of six separate cantatas for the Christmas – New Year season, each of which borrows considerable material from older compositions. Cobbled together in 1734, according to the autograph manuscript, this “oratorio” relies on the same alternation of text types and musical textures as do Bach’s passion settings, with Gospel narration by a tenor Evangelist, reflective arias for solo voices, and big “choral” movements leavened regularly by simple four-part chorales.

Part V (Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen), intended for the first Sunday after the New Year, begins in an irresistibly cheerful mood, with two oboes d’amore, strings, and voices tossing around the most joyous of musical ideas. The rest of this cantata focuses on the multifaceted role of the Star in the Christmas story: as signal to the Wise Men, as a light to the Gentiles, as a sign of danger for Herod, and as a beacon that continues to shine.

Perhaps the most timeless feature of this program is the beloved “Air” from Bach’s third “orchestral” Suite. Though the larger work otherwise follows a familiar French sequence of movements, complete with an initial “Ouverture” and some very fashionable dances, its best-known part is a humble little tune that Bach slips in just after an imposing opening movement—an unexpected little gift, perfect for this time of year!

© Matthew Dirst