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Apollo’s Fire “Hispania, a Voyage from Spain to the Americas” (Mar. 21)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Apollo’s Fire makes the enjoyment of old music easy. Less interested in the virtues of museum preservation, this band delights in having practices and creations of the past party with the present.

Their most recent show, “Hispania, a Voyage from Spain to the Americas,” is ostensibly an excursion by sea through sixteenth-century Spain and Latin America in ballades, dances, and instrumental fancies. But where another period ensemble might have rowed their boat with deliberate and reverential strokes, Jeannette Sorrell and her joyous troupe made this trip a theatrical thrill ride. I attended the performance at St. Rocco Parish on March 21.

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Apollo’s Fire: “¡Hispania! A Voyage from Spain to the Americas” — a conversation with Sophia Burgos

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by Mike Telin

This week Apollo’s Fire will present “¡Hispania! A Voyage from Spain to the Americas.” Designed by Jeannette Sorrell, this new production features the music of Spanish composers Diego Ortiz, Gaspar Sanz, and Santiago de Murcia, blending virtuosity with lively dance rhythms. The ensemble of strings, plucked instruments, and percussion includes musicians from Mexico and Costa Rica, with flamenco guitarist Jeremías García and Puerto Rican soprano Sophia Burgos featured as soloists.

Performances are on Wednesday, March 20 at 7:30 pm at St. Bernard Catholic Church in Akron, Thursday the 21st at 7:30 at St. Rocco Parish, and Friday the 22nd at 7:30 and Saturday the 23rd at 8:00 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. A pre-concert conversation with guitarist Jeremías García begins one hour before each performance. Tickets are available online.

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CD Review: violinist Alan Choo with Apollo’s Fire in Biber’s Mystery Sonatas

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by Daniel Hathaway

At its most recent concerts this month, Apollo’s Fire unveiled its newest recording on the Avie label. Mystery Sonatas by the early Baroque Bohemian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber feature concertmaster and assistant artistic director Alan Choo.

One of the most significant rediscoveries from the fascinating period when flights of fancy — dubbed the stylus fantasticus — dominated early Baroque music, Biber’s Rozenkranz-Sonaten lay hidden in the Bavarian State Library in Munich until they came to light in 1905.

That unique and beautiful manuscript from the 1670s contains fifteen solo violin sonatas and a concluding Passacaglia (below) by the prolific Biber, himself a virtuoso violinist. Identified only by a copperplate engraving illustrating its subject, each piece is a meditation on one of the sacred mysteries in the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Alan Choo and colleagues to take on more of Biber’s Rosary Sonatas

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by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire has recently been fascinated by 17th-century Bohemian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Rosary Sonatas — musical meditations on the five Joyful Mysteries, the five Sorrowful Mysteries, and the five Glorious Mysteries of the life of Christ.

Probably written in the 1670s, but unknown to modern ears until first published in 1905, the devotional work is preserved in a beautiful manuscript held in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

Four Apollo’s Fire violinists presented eight of the sonatas on programs in January 2019. And Alan Choo soloed in a pair of them on a set of programs in January 2023 as part of a multi-season project to record all fifteen sonatas plus the Passacaglia that concludes the meditations. The resulting CD, Biber’s Sacred Mysteries, has just been released, and will be available for purchase at Apollo’s Fire’s four concerts this week, when Choo will be featured in seven of the sonatas. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire — “Wassail! an Irish Appalachian Christmas” at CMA (Dec. 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire’s 2023 Christmas Show, “Wassail! an Irish Appalachian Christmas,” was a reworking of its earlier crossover shows, “Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain” and “Sugarloaf Mountain: an Appalachian Gathering” — attractive programs of folk music wrapped around the narrative of immigrants from the British Isles who brought their tunes with them to the New World. I saw the most recent version in its final performance in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, December 17.

The narrative, delivered by Derdriu Ring (also credited with theatrical direction) opens in an Irish village on Christmas Eve of 1849 during the Great Famine, then fast forwards to immigrants’ new homes in Appalachia on Christmas Day of the following year. A Wassailing segment captures the tradition of boozy, door-to-door caroling, followed by Winter by the Hearth, a celebration of coziness in the face of winter, then a segue into a telling of the Christmas story and preparations for the sea journey to America. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Wassail! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas” — Tina Bergmann talks about the hammered dulcimer

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by Mike Telin

Imagine that it’s Christmas night in Ireland, 1849. Families and friends gather for an evening of singing, storytelling, and due to the Potato Famine, tearful farewells. 

This setting serves as the inspiration for Apollo’s Fire’s “Wassail! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas.” Written and designed by artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, this theatrical concert follows the journey of the Irish immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to America through carols, reels, and stories.  

Led by Sorrell, the program features Irish singer Fiona Gillespie, vocalist Sam Kreindenweis, Kathie Stewart on wooden flutes, fiddlers Susanna Perry Gilmore, Emi Tanabe, and Caitlin Hedge, Tina Bergmann on hammered dulcimer, and Anna O’Connell on vocals and Celtic harp. Performances begin on Wednesday, December 6 at 7:30 at Bath Church UCC and run through December 17. Irish actress Derdriu Ring joins the company December 14-17. See our Concert Listings for times and locations. Tickets are available online.  

Bergmann, who is a regular on Apollo’s Fire crossover programs, first met Sorrell nearly 30 years ago while the conductor was looking for a hammered dulcimer player for an early American program. “She went to the Kent State Folk Festival, which is sort of my home festival, and came to one of the workshops where a good handful of hammered dulcimer players were presenting,” Bergmann recalled during a telephone conversation. “She approached me afterward and I invited her to my apartment. She had me play for her, and that’s how it started. I think it was in 1994, so it’s been an incredible journey.”

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Apollo’s Fire at Lakewood Methodist — “Fire & Joy: from Bach & Vivaldi” (Nov. 17)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Baroque music reaches some of its loftiest heights in concertos, and those by Antonio Vivaldi (who left us some 500) and Johann Sebastian Bach (who seeded his cantatas with concerto-like movements, wrote a collection of six famous concertos, and rearranged — or lost — goodness knows how many others) are among the most popular with ensembles like Apollo’s Fire.

On Friday, November 17, the ensemble brought its program “Fire & Joy: from Bach & Vivaldi” to Lakewood Methodist Church as a stop on its local tour that included performances in Akron, Cleveland Heights, and University Circle. Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell chose concertos by Vivaldi and Bach, pairing them with brief Bach cantata sinfonias.

The concert began with Vivaldi’s D-minor Double Violin Concerto — which Bach arranged for organ during his time at Weimar, when Italian orchestra concertos were all the rage. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire presents Fire and Joy: Nicole Divall talks about the ‘Viola of Love’

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by Mike Telin

“The first time I played the viola d’amore it was a bit of a rush job,” Apollo’s Fire principal viola Nicole Divall recalled. “It was for the St. John Passion and I borrowed an instrument and just fell in love with it. Its sound was just so sweet and beautiful I couldn’t stop practicing.”

On Thursday, November 16 at 7:30 pm at First United Methodist Church in Akron, Divall will be the featured soloist in Vivaldi’s Concerto in d for viola d’amore and orchestra.

Directed by Jeannette Sorrell, the program also includes Bach’s Oboe Concerto in F with Debra Nagy as soloist, Vivaldi’s Concerto in d for Two Violins & Cello, and three Bach Sinfonias as well as Brandenburg Concerto No. 4

The program will be repeated on Friday at 7:30 at Lakewood United Methodist, on Saturday at 8:00 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, and Sunday at 4:00 at University Circle United Methodist Church. Violinist Andrew Fouts will give a pre-concert talk one hour before each performance. Tickets are available online.

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Apollo’s Fire: Splendour in London at Church of the Gesu (Oct. 15)

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by Daniel Hathaway

After the dreary and destructive 17th-century Puritans had committed regicide, pillaged churches, padlocked theaters, and nearly succeeded in quashing all culture in England, Britain was thirsty for some public grandeur once the monarchy had been restored in the 1660s. At Westminster Abbey, the Chapel Royal, and in London’s newly reopened theaters, Henry Purcell was ready to supply it.

On Sunday, October 15 at Gesu Church in University Heights, Jeannette Sorrell led Apollo’s Fire and Singers in “Splendour in London,” a smorgasbord of Royal music by Purcell and his equally celebrated 18th century successor, George Frideric Handel. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire begins new season: a conversation with Jeannette Sorrell

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by Mike Telin

Apollo’s Fire is moving full steam ahead into their 2023-24 season, which opens this week with four Northeast Ohio performances of their program “Splendour in London.” The concerts also mark the beginning of a busy fall for the musicians and for the ensemble’s founder and artistic director, Jeannette Sorrell. In fact, with all the forward motion that Apollo’s Fire has experienced over the past couple of years, Sorrell can certainly be described as a person on the go.

I caught up with her via Zoom in Chicago while she was literally in transit and began our wide-ranging conversation by asking her to reflect on Apollo’s Fire’s recent European tour.

Jeannette Sorrell: It was a wonderful experience. That was our Exile program, which we first took to Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco. The New York concert was especially fun — it was at the Met Museum and we were sold out two weeks in advance. When you have an audience that really wants to be there, there’s always a special energy.

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