by Jane Berkner
Apollo’s Fire regaled the audience with a musically satisfying and well-played concert on June 29 at First United Methodist Church in Akron. One of its gala send-off concerts planned for this summer, the group played the same program at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts at the end of the week. The concert opened with selections from Telemann’s Don Quixote Suite, a musical portrayal of Cervantes’ novel. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When you live in a climate like Cleveland’s (or Leipzig’s, for that matter), at the first sign of moderating weather, you want to take your activities out-of-doors — rain, bugs, wind and humidity be damned. In Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach led summer concerts in Zimmermann’s Kaffegarten. In Hunting Valley last week, Jeannette Sorrell led two concerts in the “Baroque Music Barn” at the intersection of Shaker Boulevard and Chagrin River Road. On those occasions, the building formerly used to store apples rang out with the music of Bach and Telemann, including a thorny trio sonata, a requiem for a canary, and a virtuoso concerto. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When summer arrives, Apollo’s Fire lets its hair down and goes off to visit Baroque music’s country cousin — the music of Appalachian America. The ensemble’s previous show, “Come to the River,” now has a prequel: “Sugarloaf Mountain,” an equally irresistible collection of tunes from the old and new worlds chronicling the passage of immigrants from the British Isles to their new homes in the American south — in the shadow of Sugarloaf Mountain. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
The challenge for any group that takes on The Four Seasons is to “make it new,” as the poet Ezra Pound enjoined his fellow modernists. Performed and recorded time and again, Vivaldi’s most famous pieces are in perpetual danger of being played (and heard) as baroque elevator music. Apollo’s Fire, with soloist Olivier Brault, met the challenge head-on in a dramatic, fresh interpretation of these Venetian masterpieces. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Italian baroque music is immensely popular not only with modern audiences but also with advertising firms looking for energizing music to help sell cars. And there’s nothing more popular in that repertoire than Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. This week, Apollo’s Fire will launch a six-concert series called “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons rediscovered,” featuring its concertmaster, Montréal-based violinist Olivier Brault, as soloist. Two other AF violinists, Johanna Novum and Julie Andrijeski, will do the honors in another Vivaldi concerto, the famous one in d-minor for two violins that Johann Sebastian Bach liked so well that he turned it into a solo organ work.
Brault maintains a busy career in addition to his work with Apollo’s Fire. In Québec, he serves as concertmaster for Les Boréades de Montréal and Ensemble Caprice and runs his his own group, Sonate 1704, devoted to French music for violin and continuo — one of Brault’s specialties. When we spoke via Skype, he had recently returned from Belgium, where he participated in concerts, classes and lectures on music for that combination of musicians. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Apollo’s Fire’s “Fireside Concerts” this season gather audiences around the hypothetical hearth of the Bach family in Leipzig (before moving on to Zimmermann’s Coffee House). Music by Johann Christian (1735-1782) Wilhelm Friedmann (1710-1784) and Papa Bach himself feature the talented members of the ensemble’s Young Artist Apprentice Program performing alongside AF regulars, with a special appearance by three even younger members of Apollo’s Musettes. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Johann Sebastian Bach’s charming cantata about a parent in the throes of despair over his daughter’s addiction to coffee forms the centerpiece of Apollo’s Fire’s next set of concerts. “Family Frolic” will begin its run on Thursday, January 22 with a performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall.
Set in the context of a day in the Bach family quarters in Leipzig, the comedic cantata had — and will have — some connections to real life. One of Bach’s daughters answered to the nickname of Lieschen, and Madeline Apple Healey, the soprano who will play that role this weekend, actually works as a barista at Phoenix Coffee in Ohio City. And she does love the beverage she dispenses, she said in a telephone conversation. “I’m a coffee purist. Usually I just make a pourover of single origin coffee — Ethiopians are my favorite, though occasionally I’ll have a cappuccino.”
Bach penned his Kaffee-Kantate to be performed by the Leipzig Collegium Musicum at a Leipzig coffee emporium, possibly Zimmerman’s, where the composer’s student ensemble was a regular fixture. After the patrons are called to order by a narrator, Herr Schlendrian storms in, roaring like a bear over his daughter’s fascination with the caffeinated brew, which is all the rage among the younger set in Leipzig. Lieschen responds with an elaborate ode to coffee, and the conversation, or shall we say family argument, continues from that point. Artistic Director Jeannette Sorrell, who has provided a new English translation, will direct the mini-drama with tenor Corey Shotwell as narrator and bass-baritone Jeffrey Strauss as Schlendrian. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When you’re taking the risk of performing Handel’s most celebrated oratorio from end to end, you need to field a quartet of soloists with alluring personalities, bring together a stellar chorus and orchestra, and be able to count on your own fine sense of pacing — otherwise this two-and-a-half hour work could become tedious soon after the “Hallelujah” chorus. Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire had all of these elements securely in place on Saturday night at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. Its version of Messiah — presented with a sense of theater, as Handel intended it to be — scintillated, charmed and inspired the large audience from Overture to “Amen.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Most pre-concert lectures are delivered by musicologists or feature interviews with conductors. But when Apollo’s Fire gives five local performances of Handel’s Messiah beginning on Thursday, timpanist Matthew Bassett will talk about that most famous of oratorios from the point of view of the musician who has the least to do during the 2-1/2 hour work. “I don’t have that many notes to think about, but I think about them a lot,” he said in a phone conversation from Buffalo, where he serves as principal timpani with the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Bassett has had the opportunity to perform Messiah frequently with Cleveland’s baroque orchestra in the twenty years since it first presented the work. “In fact, I believe I’m the only person — and that includes Jeannette Sorrell — to have played in every Messiah that Apollo’s Fire has done.” (One set of performances the ensemble gave was led by a guest conductor.)
“You never have as much time to spend in a pre-concert talk than you think,” Bassett said, who has filled this role once before for Apollo’s Fire, “but I plan to talk about the entry of timpani into Western music and how the instruments became such an integral part of high baroque music. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Ornate, exotic, and opulent, Claudio Monterverdi’s Vespers of 1610 defines the meaning of “Baroque” — and as a religious work, it just might be a Puritan’s worst nightmare. On Friday evening, the 37 singers and instrumentalists of Apollo’s Fire gave the large audience in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron a dazzling guided tour of its many and varied attractions. [Read more…]