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Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute gears up to celebrate the music of England

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by Stephanie Manning

When Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute (BPI) began more than half a century ago, dedicated programs for studying and performing early music were almost nonexistent.

“ In the early seventies, it was really the only place where you could study that repertoire in the States,” artistic director Kenneth Slowik said in a recent interview. Thankfully, “nowadays, there are several different options.”

Throughout the decades, the renowned summer workshop has continued its annual meetings, with only a brief pause for the pandemic. From June 15–29, BPI will mark its 53rd year when it welcomes a group of both professional and avocational musicians to Oberlin Conservatory. Performers ages 15 and up will participate in workshops, master classes, and large ensembles under the theme “Music in England from Purcell to Handel.”

Where does BPI fit into today’s early music landscape? “ It still has its place, I think,” Slowik said. “Certainly, the people who come take away a two-week experience that’s unlike anything else they’ve done.”

[Read more…]

Oberlin BPI’s Dido and Aeneas: ten minutes with Lucas Harris

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by Daniel Hathaway

The 48th year of Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute sports a remarkably inclusive theme: “Music of the Enemies of Louis XIV.” BPI’s promotional materials note that in addition to engaging in four large-scale conflicts, the French Sun King managed to ruffle the feathers of nearly every major power in Europe during his 72-year reign.

Last week’s faculty concert featured music by Joan Cabanilles, Johann Joseph Fux, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Heinrich Biber, Johannes Schenck, Tomaso Albinoni, Henry Purcell, and Arcangelo Corelli in a performance that filled Kulas Recital Hall to capacity just with BPI participants.

This Friday evening, June 28 at 7:30 pm, the big faculty/guest concert moves into the much larger space of Warner Concert Hall for Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in D, Op. 6, No. 4 in D, Petronio Franceschini’s Sonata for Two Trumpets, and Johann Joseph Fux’s Ouverture in d. The evening will close with a semi-staged production of Henry Purcell’s tragedy Dido and Aeneas, based on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid. [Read more…]

Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute: faculty perform Couperin & Charpentier (June 30)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Even with a Baroque organ case looming over its stage, the utilitarian design of Oberlin’s Warner Concert Hall has nothing in common with the overwrought exuberance of the Palace of Versailles. But if you closed your eyes last Friday evening, June 30, and let your ears take over, the faculty of the Baroque Performance Institute — plus some advanced students and choral scholars — successfully transported you back three centuries to the court of Louis XIV (aka the Sun King) in extended works by François Couperin and Marc-Antoine Charpentier. [Read more…]

Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute marks anniversaries of Couperin & Charpentier

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by Daniel Hathaway

“We’ve always treated French music as something very special,” Kenneth Slowik, artistic director of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, said in a telephone conversation. “It’s one of the two reigning styles in Baroque music that we have to come back to on a regular basis.”

BPI originally rotated annually between studies of the four main national schools of Baroque performance practice — English, German, Italian, and French — but now organizes its summer institutes more thematically. Currently in the second and final week of its 47th season, the BPI faculty is busy teaching the finer points of French Baroque style to 101 students of all ages and levels of accomplishment. “We try to instill in our students some sense of how we do what we do — and why — through teaching, lectures, and by example,” Slowik said.

Before they can assign those students to the weekly chamber groups in which much of the teaching takes place, the faculty have an immense puzzle to put together. “It’s always mysterious who’s going to show up,” Slowik said. “This year we have a raft of bassoonists. Some years we’re light in the flute department and some years it’s overflowing.” [Read more…]

Bach at Oberlin BPI: the B-minor Mass in Warner Concert Hall (July 1)

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by Nicholas Jones

BPI-Mass-Concert-1Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor is, to say the least, a daunting work. It’s full of challenging vocal and instrumental parts that seem to venture into every key in the theory book. It’s composed of one complicated counterpoint after another. And like any sung mass, its musical integrity can seem at odds with the liturgical functions of the texts. And it’s long (over two hours). In its recent embodiment at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute (BPI), all of these challenges seemed to disappear. [Read more…]

Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute to perform Bach’s B-Minor Mass

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by Neil McCalmont

bpi-massOn Friday, July 1 at 8 pm in Warner Concert Hall, the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute will close its faculty concerts with a masterwork by a titan of Western culture: J.S. Bach’s Mass in b minor, BWV 232. The institute traditionally selects one magnum opus per season, but this summer has chosen two: Handel’s Concerti Grossi, Op. 3 (the concert was on June 24), and the Bach mass. For an added twist, the mass will be performed with one singer, one instrumentalist per part, a decision that has sparked fistfights in the past.

The work’s history is complicated, as Bach originally wrote the “Kyrie and Gloria,” “Sanctus,” and “Crucifixus” earlier in his career for different purposes. Though the composer was nearly blind in his last years, he revised these movements accordingly and completed the work in 1749, only a year before his death. [Read more…]

Keyboard CD Reviews: Recordings by Robert Cassidy, Caroline Oltmanns, Webb Wiggins & Todd Wilson

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Pathways: Robert Cassidy, piano (MSR Classics).

Cassidy-PathwaysAlthough composer Claude Debussy rejected the term “impressionism” and referred to music writers who used the term as “fools,” today Debussy’s music is synonymous with the impressionist movement. On his self-titled CD from back in 2012, pianist Robert Cassidy captured the essence of the composer’s  music with his performances of the twelve Préludes of Book 1. On his latest recording, Pathways, Cassidy once again demonstrates his affinity for this music with discerning interpretations of the twelve preludes that comprise Debussy’s second book, as well as works by Chopin and Feigin.

From the first prelude to the last, Cassidy plays with a light touch, assured technique, and an expansive color palette. While no. 3, La Puerta del Vino (Mouvement de Habanera), is appealingly seductive, Cassidy brings a playfulness to Ondine (Water-Sprite) during No. 8. The pianist beautifully voices No. 10, Canope (Très calme et doucement triste), and the concluding Feux d’artifice (Fireworks) brings his performance to a flashy end. [Read more…]

BPI Perspectives: Kenneth Slowik discusses concert repertoire

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by Jeremy Reynolds

SLOWIK-Kenneth“My first experience with BPI was when I crashed it with a friend from Chicago in 1972,” recalled Kenneth Slowik, now Artistic Director of the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin Conservatory. Four decades later, Slowik explained how he became involved with the program and elaborated on this year’s festival (June 21 – July 4) in a recent telephone conversation.

“I had a friend in Chicago when we were both students,” Slowik said. “I found out that he had gone to BPI to study viol in the very first summer that it started, and he came back raving about the program. So much so that we did some playing together and crashed BPI the next year!” [Read more…]

Review: Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute — faculty concert revisits historic 1786 performance (June 27)

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by Daniel Hathaway

CPE-Bach-Program-1786“The Bach Legacy” is the overriding theme in this summer’s Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, and artistic director Kenneth Slowik decided to devote the second faculty concert on Friday, June 21 to a partial replication of an historic benefit concert given in Hamburg in April of 1786 by Johann Sebastian Bach’s most celebrated son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. (Program pictured here.)

That concert, given in support of a medical institute for the poor, began with what seems to have been the first ever performance of the Credo from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in b minor. C.P.E. Bach provided the Credo with a brief, new introduction and slightly adapted it to a new age when instruments like the oboe d’amore had become obsolete and needed to be replaced (in this case by violins). [Read more…]

Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute documents The Bach Legacy

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by Daniel Hathaway

Bach-CPH-06For the forty-third edition of the Baroque Performance Institute, which has drawn a hundred students of early music to the Oberlin Conservatory this summer, Kenneth Slowik, artistic director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society in Washington, D.C. and artistic director of BPI, has chosen to focus on the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach. “It’s always a great pleasure to do the Bach legacy, but the other great spur was the 300th anniversary of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach”, born in 1714 “into a remarkable family of musicians.”

More like a dynasty perhaps, because the surname “Bach” was nearly synonymous with “musician” in eighteenth-century Thuringia, accounting for more than 50 musicians with the Bach surname before Johann Sebastian’s sons began traveling into the wider world.

And debunking the widespread notion that the music by the most famous of Bachs, C.P.E.’s father Johann Sebastian, was denounced by his sons as old-fashioned and all but forgotten after his death in 1750, a highlight of this year’s institute, which runs from June 15-29, will be the partial reeanactment on June 27 of a famous charity concert C.P.E. gave in Hamburg in 1786. [Read more…]

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