by Daniel Hathaway
Editor Daniel Hathaway is covering the 2017 Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute from June 18 through July 1 as an “embedded” harpsichord student, joining 123 other participants whose birth dates span a remarkable range from 1927 to 2003
He’ll be posting reports on a daily basis. Follow his narrative here (or click on “BPI 2017” in the navigation bar above). [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Though we were kept very busy this week, by Friday people were relaxing into their routines and there was time and opportunity to get to know one another a little better.
As coachings went on, I had some nice conversations with my fellow ensemble members, who brought a bit more experience to the Baroque Performance Institute than others, but reflected the expansive age range of participants (in our case from teens to 70s).
Luka Stefanović, the cellist, is 17, but already has an impressive track record on the modern cello (his father plays violin in the Baltimore Symphony). Florence Peacock, the soprano (from Chapel Hill, NC), has attended BPI for many years and has managed to overcome auditory problems with the help of high-tech hearing aids — she’s amazing. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
If people seemed a bit wooly-headed on Friday morning, the day began with Donner und Blitzen: nearly everybody sleeping near a window was rudely awakened about 5 in the morning by bright flashes of lightning and heavenly timpani.
Mark Edwards spent two hours in his harpsichord class reflecting on the finer points of ornamentation and touch, beginning with a Rondeau by François Couperin whose languorous first half suddenly turned lively. Edwards pointed out that Couperin was an awesome player whose notation of ornaments preserved all his niceties of touch and style. In a second work, Edwards advised a student to make a difference between a downward motion and the feeling of gripping the sound of the instrument toward you. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Rhythm is right up there with harmony as a pillar of Baroque music. So it’s curious that French composers like Louis Couperin, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Jean-Henri D’Anglebert invented the concept of “unmeasured preludes” and notated them as shown here.
The calligraphy is beautiful on the page, but how do you rhythmicize those notes at the keyboard? Mitzi Meyerson devoted much of Thursday morning’s harpsichord master class to that topic, beginning as always with student performances. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Lisa Crawford spent Wednesday’s harpsichord master class drilling down into French keyboard practice and technique. I was the first to play, and the piece was Jean-Henri D’Anglebert’s arrangement of Lully’s Ouverture to Proserpine. Here, Crawford concentrated on notes that needed emphasis or de-emphasis though articulation, an effect that could partly be accomplished by fingering.
Broadening the topic to editions of works, she said that the beautiful, digitally engraved score I and most of the class had downloaded from IMSLP — everyone’s favorite online source for free music — presented problems. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
At BPI, as elsewhere in the musical universe, master classes are the principal conduit for transferring wisdom from teachers to students. Rather than just dryly lecturing on abstract topics, distinguished musicians use performances of selected works as the springboard for discussions of matters both wide and narrow.
Harpsichord master classes on Monday with Lisa Goode Crawford, Mark Edwards, and Mitzi Meyerson offered a long list of takeaways, but also introduced BPI’s 22 harpsichordists to the unique personalities of their mentors [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
On Sunday, your editor is going off to summer camp for two weeks.
In a recent conversation with Oberlin Conservatory baroque flute professor Michael Lynn, Mike Telin and I mused about covering the annual Baroque Performance Institute from a new perspective in this, its 46th season. Thus the idea was hatched of imbedding someone in the Institute to report on the experience from the perspective of a student. Lynn noted that this summer’s activities would especially favor the harpsichord, so guess who was put forward as the logical choice.
By the end of the day, members of the BPI faculty had enthusiastically signed off on the idea, so on June 18, I will join 123 other participants whose birth dates span a remarkable range from 1927 to 2003 for “Traveling Through the Baroque 1650-1750.” [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
Johann 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…]
by Neil McCalmont
On 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…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“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…]