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Apollo’s Fire: “Echoes of Venice” at Trinity Cathedral (Oct. 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The special, spatial music of the Gabrielis and their early Baroque successors at San Marco in Venice has been famous for a long time. But until modern performers took up and mastered the instruments and playing style of the mixed wind and string ensembles that held forth from the galleries of that Byzantine basilica, replicating the timbres of 17th-century polychoral music that drew Northern composers like Heinrich Schütz to the Most Serene Republic just wasn’t possible. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: cellist René Schiffer
embarks on his Bach Project

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by Daniel Hathaway

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his six solo cello suites between 1717 and 1723, when he was employed as Kapellmeister by the Duke of Anhalt-Köthen, but it was only much later that these works became widely known and hailed for their profundity.

Credit Pablo Casals, who bought a second-hand score of the pieces in Barcelona in 1890 at the age of 13, and worked on them for a dozen years before daring to play them in public. He preserved his performances between 1936 and 1939 in a recording that the Library of Congress chose earlier this year for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.

Performances of the six suites have become something of an Everest for cellists. The Cleveland Orchestra’s Dane Johansen hiked the 600-mile Camino de Santiago in 2014, recording the suites in 36 churches along the pilgrimage route. More conventionally but no less impressively, Yo-Yo Ma played all six in one evening at Blossom in August of 2018.

Now, Apollo’s Fire principal cello René Schiffer has decided to take the suites on, but in a different format and from a special point of view. He’ll perform and record them two at a time beginning this weekend. [Read more…]

Dark Horse Consort joins Apollo’s Fire to explore “Echoes of Venice” 

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by Daniel Hathaway

Turning away at the beginning of the 17th century from the Flemish polyphonic tradition — which had long reigned in the private chapel of the Doges in Venice — San Marco organist Giovanni Gabrieli took advantage of the church’s multiple choir lofts to invent a new polychoral style that allowed for complex spatial effects, including echoes.

Probably more than a few audience members attending Apollo’s Fire’s “Echoes of Venice” performances this week were first introduced to Gabrieli’s opulent music through a famous old recording by organist E. Power Biggs, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Texas Boys Choir, and the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble — who performed on modern trumpets and trombones.

In four concerts this week, Apollo’s Fire and Apollo’s Singers will join the Dark Horse Consort, a Boston-based ensemble comprising period strings, cornetti, and sackbuts, to recreate the sounds that might actually have bounced back and forth under the seven domes of St. Mark’s in 1615. That was the year Gabrieli published his 14-part motet for three choirs, In Ecclesiis. [Read more…]

Early Folk Band musicians to join Apollo’s Fire in “Far Beyond the Sea”

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by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire’s Countryside Concerts will feature a new trans-Atlantic collaboration this month. Ian Harrison, Gesine Bänfer, and Steven Player of Europe’s The Early Folk Band will join Clevelanders Amanda Powell, Tina Bergmann, and Brian Kay in five performances of “Far Beyond the Sea” from June 6 through 10. This genre-crossing project involving old world ballads has been contemplated for some time but is just now coming to fruition.

“Jeannette Sorrell is one of our greatest fans, and we’ve been trying to get this sort of thing together for six or seven years,” Harrison and Bänfer said in a tag-team Skype conversation from Freiburg, Germany. “Either we weren’t free or they weren’t free, or we couldn’t decide how to do it, but we’re very happy that it’s now working.” [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Bach’s B-Minor Mass at St. Raphael, Bay Village (Apr. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In the third of four back-to-back performances of J.S. Bach’s “Great Catholic Mass” on Sunday afternoon, April 14 in St. Raphael Church in Bay Village, the musicians of Apollo’s Fire showed no signs of fatigue despite heavy physical and musical demands. Led by artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, soloists, chorus, and instrumentalists gave uniformly brilliant performances of a musical monument that the composer was only able to hear in bits and pieces during his lifetime. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: period brass players Steven Marquardt & Todd Williams talk about Bach’s B-Minor Mass

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by Daniel Hathaway

Patrons of Apollo’s Fire and the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival will have the rare experience this weekend of hearing J.S. Bach’s great B-Minor Mass performed locally for the first time on period instruments. Among those will be three natural trumpets and a single natural horn — both played without valves. The distinguished performers will include trumpeter Steven Marquardt and hornist Todd Williams.

Marquardt and his colleagues Perry Sutton and Stanley Curtis will be doing a lot of trumpeting during the Mass. “The Bach is really quite demanding. We play in eleven of the 27 movements, compared to only five in Handel’s Messiah — and two of those are back to back, so it’s more like four,” he said in a telephone conversation.

Williams, on the other hand, will be making a true cameo appearance, playing only in the “Quoniam” of the “Gloria,” an unusual bass aria supported by solo horn and a pair of bassoons. “The ‘Quoniam’ is not as stratospheric as the trumpet parts, though it has its own challenges,” he said in a separate conversation. “You sit there for 45 minutes, then you have to play a very difficult and quite famous solo. It’s sort of a wild movement, with a mood change that’s a bit shocking after what came just before. [Read more…]

Director Dirk Garner fills us in on Baldwin Wallace’s 87th Bach Festival

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by Daniel Hathaway

Founded in 1932 by Albert Riemenschneider (probably best known today for his edition of Bach’s 371 harmonized chorales), the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival turns a spry 87 years old this year. Festival director Dirk Garner continues to infuse the extended Festival weekend with new ideas. We chatted with him by phone to ask what’s new on the agenda for 2019.

“There are two or three changes this year. We’ve added a Thursday evening concert specifically to celebrate our new orchestra conductor, Soo Han. He’s just been here a year, but he’s making a big splash. He’s a wonderful musician, and the students love him.” That opening concert on Thursday, April 11 at 7:00 pm in Gamble Auditorium includes Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s Air on the G String from the third orchestral suite, Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 in D, and Christopher Theofanidis’ Rainbow Body.

“The Stokowski arrangement ties into what I think is so cool about this year’s Festival,” Garner said. “It shows the many faces of Bach in the 21st century. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire in Vivaldi, Bach & Telemann (March 8)

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by Timothy Robson

Despite the lurid title of last weekend’s Apollo’s Fire concerts — Three Duels and a Funeral — no blood was shed onstage at St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday evening, March 8. The entertaining program concocted by director Jeannette Sorrell was a set of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, plus a humorous solo cantata by Georg Philipp Telemann eulogizing a talented, but murdered, canary. Each of the works had its own imaginative character. [Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: Jeffrey Strauss returns for the funeral of Telemann’s canary

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by Daniel Hathaway

When Jeffrey Strauss sings Georg Philipp Telemann’s Funeral Cantata for an Artistically Trained Canary with Apollo’s Fire in four performances this weekend (March 7-10), the baritone will be returning to the stage for the first time following major heart surgery in the fall.

The affliction that sidelined him for six months came as a complete surprise. After singing the ensemble’s Baroque Music Barn concerts last June, Strauss took to bed for a week with a fever that persisted, eventually sending him to his doctor in Chicago for tests. “A blood culture finally identified it as a serious but not that uncommon bacterial infection,” he said in a telephone conversation. After five days in hospital, Strauss was sent home with five weeks’ worth of intravenous antibiotics and an appointment with a cardiologist — the bacteria had damaged a valve in his heart that needed to be replaced.

“I had a wonderful surgeon,” Strauss said. “When he found out I was a singer, he immediately said, ‘I’ll tell the anesthesiologist to put a smaller tube down your windpipe.’ [Read more…]

Sulayman, Sorrell & Apollo’s Fire win Grammy for Songs of Orpheus

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by Daniel Hathaway

Apollo’s Fire was among the Grammy winners for classical music announced in Los Angeles on February 10. The award in the Best Solo Vocal Album category was given for the ensemble’s Avie recording, Songs of Orpheus, featuring tenor Karim Sulayman. Conductor Jeannette Sorrell led an ensemble that included Julie Andrijeski, Johanna Novom, Karina Schmitz, René Schiffer, Rebecca Landell Reed, William Simms, and Brian Kay.

[Read more…]

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