MiV Home
St Andrew's United Church, Nanaimo
January 13, 2018
Being of a Romantic and Impressionist musical persuasion rather than Baroque, I might normally have balked at attending a concert given by an orchestra so singularly devoted to the latter. However, my ears were longing for live music after all the noisy hubbub of the Christmas and New Year celebrations, so I gathered enough courage to spend an evening with Vivaldi, Dall'Abaco, Locatelli, Geminiani and Brescianello. And I am now very glad I did.
The church was almost full, and so was the stage with fourteen musicians raring to start playing. Among the instruments, the theorbo lute with its very long neck stood out. As if reading the minds of the audience, Guzman Ramos used the interval between two pieces of music to demonstrate the functionality of the instrument. Low-register bass strings are added on the extended neck, which gives a theorbo a much wider range of notes than a regular lute, rather like a harp. "Easy to play", said Ramos with a wink.
The Baroque composers liked to experiment with tone colour. In the second movement of Antonio Vivaldi's very last composition, the Sinfonia for strings (RV 149), he achieved an unusual colour by having two of the violins play arco (bowed) to an accompaniment of pizzicato (plucked) by the remaining violins. During Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco's Concerto in E minor Op.5 No.3, the violins in the front row fell silent at times, leaving the ones in the back row to carry the tune and creating an interesting dialogue. Throughout the concert I experienced something I hadn't noticed before. As is often the case, some of the violins and violas were positioned to the left on the stage, and the others to the right. The ones on the left are tilted towards the audience by virtue of the way the instruments are held. The ones on the right are therefore tilted away from the audience. As a result, the audience perceives the sound of the strings on the left as loud and crisp, while the ones on the right are heard as somewhat subdued, hence enhancing the stereo quality of the performance.
I am always impressed by the level of multi-tasking required of a concert leader who doubles as conductor and instrumentalist. While the other musicians could focus on their scores, Kati Debretzeni only glanced at hers, indicating rhythm and mood with her bow and the neck of her violin in between her own demanding passages. She is also a breathtaking virtuoso on the violin, as demonstrated during the Vivaldi Concerto for violin and double orchestra (RV 582). Suddenly during the third movement she burst into a solo cadenza (which she said she had "nicked" from a different piece by Vivaldi), abandoning her music stand altogether to position herself in the aisle between the pews. At one point she played notes that were so high in pitch that only dogs could hear them — or so she joked, adding that someone had dubbed the cadenza "The Battersea Dogs Home". At the end, the audience responded with loud cheers.
After the intermission we were treated to another piece by Vivaldi, namely his Chamber Concerto in C major (RV 88), followed by Pietro Locatelli's Concerto Grosso Op.7 No.6. Debretzeni called the latter "a mini-opera without singers" on the tragic theme of Ariadne and her truant lover Theseus. In the course of the five movements, Ariadne wakes up from her sleep, discovers that Theseus is gone, weeps in despair and eventually goes into an almighty rage. The piece is also a pleasant departure from the strictly disciplined Baroque musical tradition, in that it is less structured in tempo as well as harmony. With a bit of imagination one can almost hear a hint of the rich textures of Grieg and Sibelius.
The concert ended with Francesco Geminiani's 4-movement Concerto Grosso in A major (H. 140) and Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello's single-movement Chaconne in A major, the latter woven around repeated chord progressions that nowadays form the skeleton of pop music and jazz. The audience was clearly ecstatic. I myself left the concert humming fragments of the music. Who would have guessed?
MiV Home