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.
by David Kulma
Is it possible to take the standard song and dance forms of your time and turn them into virtuosic devotional meditations on the life of Christ? The composer and master violinist Heinrich Biber answered this question in the affirmative back in the 1670s with a set of 16 violin works — 15 sonatas with continuo and a solo passacaglia — meant to take the musicians through the Mysteries of the Rosary. And not only are these works demanding in scope, they require complex scordatura — retuning the violin’s strings to new notes for each sonata and giving each work its own color and resonance.
by Daniel Hathaway
Tell your friends you’re headed to a Biber concert and their thoughts will immediately turn to a certain Canadian pop star. There’s another Biber, of course, probably famous only in early music circles, and Apollo’s Fire will treat its audiences to a good chunk of one of his violin masterworks this weekend.
Violinists Carrie Krause, Johanna Novom, Adriane Post, and Karina Schmitz will take turns playing nine of the fifteen virtuosic pieces that make up 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.
The sonatas are pictorial and expressive, but a special feature of the collection is Biber’s requirement that the violin strings be re-tuned for most of the pieces after the first sonata. This practice is called scordatura. “What I love about it is that it changes the resonance of the instrument so much,” Karina Schmitz said in a telephone conversation. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
ACRONYM — Anachronistic Cooperative, Realizing Obscure Nuanced Yesteryear’s Masterpieces — does not play the kind of music that marketers can brand as “relaxing.” Just as classical musicians have questioned the selling of their art as soporific and soothing, these twelve string and keyboard players reject sleepiness, self-seriousness, and the confines of the canon. On The Battle, the Bethel & the Ball, they pursue their stated mission of giving life to unknown, “wild instrumental music of the 17th century.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When an ensemble’s programs are as carefully curated as those of Cleveland’s Les Délices, it makes perfect sense to preserve them nearly intact in the form of a recording. Age of Indulgence is a case in point. Presented twice in November of 2015, the program delivered everything the ensemble is known for: expert, accessible performances of French Baroque repertoire using a small number of players in inventive combinations, always chosen to make an artistic point without pretense or pedantry, and performed without intermission in the course of an hour and a quarter. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Historical performance groups have revitalized Baroque music by performing 17th- and 18th-century works on the instruments for which they were written. More recently, a number of those ensembles have made forays into the classical world of Haydn and Mozart and the early Romantic era of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, expanding their musical rhetoric and stretching the capabilities of their instruments.
Now add Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire to that list. Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra will conclude their 25th-anniversary season with “Beethoven and Schubert Rediscovered,” a festival that includes four Beethoven concerts, a “Schubertiade,” a dance workshop, and lectures and panel discussions.
The Beethoven programs, which run from April 26-29, will feature Berlin Philharmonic first concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley performing the Violin Concerto. The program includes the Egmont Overture and the Fifth Symphony.
by Nicholas Jones
The truism holds that French aristocrats before the Revolution danced time away in utter complacency, refusing to change in the face of the inevitable. The image is probably true with respect to most things that would have mattered to those who stormed the Bastille. But in the world of music, things were changing decades before the Revolution. Writing within a framework of courtly elegance that would have pleased Marie Antoinette, composers were also pushing the boundaries of their music with wit, irony, turmoil, and glimmers of Romantic self-consciousness. [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…]