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Julian Wachner & Apollo’s Fire: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at CMA (Dec. 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In 1735, Johann Sebastian Bach’s congregations in the two principal churches of Leipzig were treated to six new cantatas between Christmas Day and Epiphany, at a rate of one per feast day. In 2019, Apollo’s Fire’s audiences got to hear two-thirds of those pieces in one sitting, as guest conductor Julian Wachner led Cantatas Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 6 of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in five venues around the city. I heard the performance on Friday, December 13 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. [Read more…]

Les Délices: “Mozart & Beethoven Quintets” at Lakewood Congregational (Nov. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

No longer just a French Baroque ensemble, Les Délices has recently branched out into earlier and later musical periods and crossed national borders. In the latest development, founder, artistic director, and oboist Debra Nagy invited fortepianist Sylvia Berry and three period wind instrument colleagues — clarinetist Colin Lawson, bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, and hornist Todd Williams — to join her in well-known quintets from the Viennese Classical period.

[Read more…]

English clarinetist Colin Lawson to join Les Délices in Mozart and Beethoven

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by Jarrett Hoffman

You might expect that someone who’s a leader in their field was hooked from their initial encounter with it. Colin Lawson, described as “the doyen of period clarinettists” by BBC Magazine, had a different first impression of early music performance.

“I was rather put off because some of the musical results were not that fantastic,” Lawson said by telephone from the Royal College of Music in London, where he directs the school, chairs its historical performance program, and teaches classical clarinet. “I was very interested in the academic side of early music, but it took me a bit of time to get ‘round to playing it.”

Audiences are certainly happy that he did get around to it. His credentials as a player include performances with Britain’s leading period orchestras, solo appearances in Wigmore and Carnegie Halls, and recordings of an array of concertos and chamber music.

Lawson’s latest project falls in the category of things that are always exciting and often challenging: meeting new musicians — some from another continent, no less — and playing chamber music with them. Next weekend, under the umbrella of Les Délices, he will join oboist Debra Nagy, bassoonist Wouter Verschuren, hornist Todd Williams, and fortepianist Sylvia Berry in three concerts of music by Mozart and Beethoven.

[Read more…]

Les Délices in “The Elements” at Lakewood Congregational (Apr. 6)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Les Délices concluded their tenth anniversary season from April 5-7 with evocations of what our Baroque forebears thought to be the basic constituents of the natural world. The three programs sprang from founder and oboist Debra Nagy’s arrangement of Jean-Féry Rebel’s brilliant Les Elements, but also included extracts from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and a new work commissioned from Theo Chandler. Harpsichordist Mark Edwards provided a complementary interlude: two of Rameau’s keyboard works that express the powers of nature. [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…]

Les Délices closes 10th Anniversary Season with The Elements

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by Mike Telin

Over the past ten years the music of Jean-Féry Rebel has become familiar to Les Délices audiences. The ensemble has performed several of the composer’s violin and trio sonatas, scenes from his opera L’Ulysse which highlighted the Odyssey-inspired program Myths & Allegories, and his early choreographed symphonies such as Caractères de la danse, which have become signature pieces for the group.

This week Les Délices will return to the music of Rebel when they present a program titled “The Elements” which is centered around Rebel’s 1737 masterpiece of the same name. The program also includes music of Rameau and the premiere of a new, nature-inspired piece for period instruments by Theo Chandler.

Concerts take place on Friday, April 5 at 7:30 pm at Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Saturday the 6th at 8:00 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church, and Sunday the 7th at 4:00 pm in Herr Chapel at Plymouth Church. Tickets are available online. On Saturday beginning at 3:00 pm at the Bop Stop, Les Délices will present “Mother Nature Makes Music,” a free 45-minute program designed for children ages 5-12.

[Read more…]

Les Délices and the Newberry Consort decode the Leuven Chansonnier (Jan. 20)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Understanding the tradition of Courtly Love (the solely poetic, unconsummated passion between a knight and a married noblewoman) as expressed in French music of the 15th century (sparse, ornate, and replete with artifice) is a reach for 21st-century audiences. But Cleveland’s Les Délices and Chicago’s Newberry Consort brought some of the repertoire preserved in the recently-discovered Leuven Chansonnier to vibrant life on Sunday afternoon at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. [Read more…]

Les Délices & Newberry Consort to bring diminutive 15th-century songbook to life

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by Daniel Hathaway

Note: the Saturday evening concert in Lakewood has been cancelled due to the severe weather forecast. It’s always fun when musical scores suddenly emerge from wherever they’ve been hiding for decades or centuries. In 2014, a physically tiny collection of 15th-century songs came into the hands of an art dealer in Brussels and caused quite a stir in the early music world. It brought the total of such books that survive to 6, and its beautifully notated pages contain 50 pieces, 12 of which were previously unknown.

“Unbelievable. It’s like suddenly finding a dozen new drawings by Rubens!” said a researcher at the Alamire Foundation of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, which owns what is now known as the Leuven Chansonnier. “We hope that we’ll be able to find out who created the songs. The 38 known works are very interesting as well, because they’re often different versions from the ones we already know.”

When Les Délices and its Chicago counterpart, The Newberry Consort, were casting about for a collaborative project, the Leuven Songbook came immediately to mind for both directors, Debra Nagy and Ellen Hargis. “I told Debra we’d love to do something with that,” Hargis said in a telephone conversation, “and she said, ‘So would we. It doesn’t make any sense to do two programs, so why not do it together?’” [Read more…]

Les Délices & Quire Cleveland in Charpentier Noëls (Dec. 23)

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by Timothy Robson

In what must have been among the most alluring Christmas music concerts of this season, period instrument ensemble Les Délices (Debra Nagy, director) and Quire Cleveland (Jay White, director) teamed up to present French Baroque music for Christmas, highlighted by the Messe de Minuit (“Midnight Mass”) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704). [Read more…]

Les Délices & Quire Cleveland: a conversation with guest conductor Eric Milnes

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by Daniel Hathaway

If you stop to think about it, most of our American Christmas traditions have their roots in British and German culture. Far fewer trace their origins to France, even though colonization brought French influence to a large portion of what is now the United States. Les Délices, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble, will join the singers of Quire Cleveland this weekend to explore this less-familiar, Gallic side of Christmas in three concerts of music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier led by guest conductor Eric Milnes.

The concerts, at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron on December 21 at 7:30 pm, at Lakewood Congregational on December 22 at 8:00 pm, and Our Lady of Peace on December 23 at 4:00 pm, will be anchored by Charpentier’s unique Midnight Mass on French Noëls. “There are eleven French Noëls incorporated into the Mass either in instrumental interludes or in ingenious interpolations throughout the text,” Milnes said in a telephone conversation. “Almost every main motive is derived from a carol tune. It’s hard for us in our Anglo-German culture to imagine a mass built on Silent Night or Joy to the World.”

Will all those tunes be as familiar to the audience as the carols he mentioned? “Maybe one or two of them have made their way into our holiday traditions, maybe not,” Milnes said. “I have the benefit of working a lot in Québec, so I get to experience more directly how that population relates to the tradition. But these carols are still far less known, far less performed, and far less familiar than their German or English counterparts, even in the Baroque community.” [Read more…]

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