by Daniel Hathaway
Les Délices’ normal métier is French Baroque music, but last weekend the ensemble turned to earlier French music, joining forces with Boston’s Blue Heron to produce a condensed version of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune. Their performance of this dit, or long narrative poem, by the 14th-century superstar attracted a good-sized audience to Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City on Saturday evening. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
During his lifetime, French Medieval poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut produced manuscripts of 6 complete works containing more than 15 long narrative poems, 280 lyric poems, and 23 secular motets, as well as the earliest setting of the complete ordinary of the Mass by a single composer.
This weekend, Les Délices and Boston-based vocal ensemble Blue Heron will present one of Machaut’s narrative poems, Remède de Fortune. This musical-poetic masterpiece recounts the story of a bumbling lover who — with help from Hope and by the good grace of Fortune — ultimately gets the girl. The performances will include projected supertitles and manuscript images illustrating the story.
A free, open rehearsal at St. John’s Church in Ohio City on Wednesday, March 8 beginning at 6:30 pm will be followed by three full performances: Thursday, March 9 at 8:00 pm in Stull Recital Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory (free); Saturday, March 11 at 8:00 pm at St. John’s; and Sunday, March 12 at 4:00 pm in Herr Chapel of Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin
This past week Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s Baroque orchestra conducted by Jeannette Sorrell, presented five performances of its “Virtuoso Bach” program. Sunday afternoon’s performance at Rocky River Presbyterian Church benefitted visually from the church’s lovely setting, but the high ceiling and wide space created a rather muddy acoustic that at times affected the clarity of sound. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Apollo’s Fire’s next series of concerts from February 16-20 will spotlight members of the ensemble as soloists in orchestral music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Oboist Debra Nagy will be featured in the Oboe Concerto in g, and Nagy will join oboist Kathryn Montoya in the C-Major Orchestral Suite. Completing the program will be Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 3 and 4.
We reached Debra Nagy in Berkeley, California. She was on the West Coast fulfilling one of her many guest gigs with early music ensembles nationally and abroad. In Cleveland, she is artistic director of the French Baroque ensemble Les Délices.
by Daniel Hathaway
The 21-year-old Mozart planned to take Paris by storm on his second visit in 1778, but he chiefly succeeded in alienating colleagues and patrons alike with his arrogance. The composer fared far better on Sunday afternoon, January 22 at Plymouth Church, when Les Délices presented “Mozart in Paris,” a program that surrounded his Oboe Quartet with works by Gluck, Cambini, Duport, and Boccherini, all pieces that the Parisian public might have heard in the French capital during that period. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Mozart made an excellent impression visiting Paris with his father and sister in the mid-1760s. However, when he returned to the city in the spring of 1778, things didn’t go so well. “Despite the successful premiere of his Paris Symphony, and a few other commissions, he felt misunderstood,” oboist Debra Nagy said during a recent conversation. “But it was his bad attitude that was ultimately his undoing.”
On Saturday, January 21 at 8:00 pm at 2731 Prospect Gallery, Les Délices will present “Mozart in Paris.” The program, which marks the ensemble’s first full concert featuring music from the Classical era, will include Mozart’s Quartet for Oboe and Strings, quintets by Luigi Boccherini and Christoph Willibald Gluck, a string quartet by Giuseppe Cambini, and an etude by renowned French cellist Jean-Louis Duport. The program will be repeated on Sunday, January at 4:00 pm at Herr Chapel in Plymouth Church. In addition to Nagy, performers include violinists Julie Andrijeski and Beth Wenstrom, violist Cynthia Black, and cellist Elinor Frey. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
A good song is a good song, and for centuries vocal music has been a fruitful source of repertoire for instrumentalists. In “Songs Without Words,” Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy has created an inspired program that juxtaposes 17th-century art songs with 20th-century jazz standards. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“Instrumentalists, especially during the last couple of decades of the 17th century, would often turn to vocal music as a source of repertory for their solo playing,” said Debra Nagy, Les Délices Artistic Director, during a recent interview. “This program uses that idea as its point of departure and brings the concept into the 20th century with jazz standards arranged for and improvised by the ensemble.”
On Saturday, October 15 at 8:00 pm at SPACES, and on Sunday at 4:00 pm at Herr Chapel, Plymouth Church, Les Délices will kick off its new season with a program titled “Songs Without Words.” The program will feature torch songs spanning the 17th to 20th centuries, including music by Michel Lambert, Marin Marais, Billy Strayhorn, and Nina Simone. [Read more…]
by Steven Plank
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
In a sadly pleasing strain
Let the warbling lute complain.
Alexander Pope’s memorable couplet from his Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day poetically voices the doleful propensity of the lute, and with the news of the death of Stephen Toombs on August 17, it also seems to voice the Cleveland musical community’s deep sense of loss. In his 28 years as the music librarian at Case Western Reserve University, Stephen combined a love of scholarship and the diverse sources that bring it to life with a passion for the music that was dearest to his heart: Renaissance and Baroque music for the lute.
The intertwining of these strands was deep-rooted in his training as musicologist, librarian, and lutenist, and given the high distinction of the performance practice program at the University, this meant that at his arrival there, both the school and its new librarian could rejoice in a match most felicitously made. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
When we hear the big names of French Baroque music — Couperin, Lully, Rameau — we think of the opulence of the courts of Paris and Versailles. And we think big — long, serious operas on mythical subjects, string bands packed with dozens of players, and hefty subsidies from king and courtiers. But outside the heady claustrophobia of the courts, Paris also had a looser musical counterculture in the suburbs: small ensembles that played music based on popular tunes, and presented “operas” based not on the tragedies of gods and heroes but on the complications of everyday life. [Read more…]