Early music returns to Rochester this month

Rochester’s lively early music scene starts up again this month with season openers from Publick Musick and Pegasus. When you attend these concerts, you’ll notice some familiar faces. These concerts share a number of musicians, namely violinist Boel Gidholm, cellist Christopher Haritatos, lutenist Deborah Fox, and organist and harpsichordist Naomi Gregory.

“There’s a fairly small pool of early music performers in Rochester,” says Fox, “so we’re happy to set up each other’s music stands.”Even with similar performers, these concerts will present contrasting, and stimulating, music.

This weekend, Publick Musick opens appropriately with “Opus 1,” an array of chamber compositions that were among their composers’ first published works. Some of these composers became very famous—Vivaldi, Geminiani, Corelli—and others will be discoveries. But as Gidholm, one of Publick Musick’s artistic directors, says, “We all have to start somewhere.”

In these cases, “somewhere” was 17^th and 18^th-century Italy, where music was quickly transitioning from Renaissance and Baroque styles to the Classical style—from polyphony (several voices simultaneously) to a simpler, more melodic style. Many composers were virtuoso violinists, so pride of place was usually given to the violin, with harmonic underpinning from bass instruments (generally the cello). The texture was filled out by a keyboard or lute, making three parts which came to be called the trio sonata. (Solo vocal music and opera also developed during this period, but in instrumental music at least, says Gidholm, “the trio sonata ruled the world.”)

The first composer represented in “Opus 1,” Biagio Marini, was born in 1594, and the last, Charles Avison, died in 1770, so the program will cover a century and half of music— “almost the entire Baroque period,” Gidholm points out. She adds that audiences should hear many musical connections; Italian composers in this era traveled and taught all over Europe. For example, Francesco Geminiani went to London, where Avison studied with him.

These early works of prominent composers are imaginative, dramatic, and sometimes experimental; “they haven’t really settled on the forms their music should take,” says Gidholm. “The linchpin of the change is Arcangelo Corelli.” One of the most revered 17^th– century composers; Corelli was much concerned with form and balance. His trio sonatas and concerti came to be considered exemplars of “classical” composition.

The concert ends with the most popular composer of all these, Antonio Vivaldi, whose long list of concertos, choral works, and operas, begins with “La Follia,” a set of variations over the harmonies of a popular 17^th-century tune, one borrowed by dozens of composers from Corelli up to Rachmaninoff.

Publick Musick will perform “Opus 1” first in Dansville, where they’re also popular performers, and then in Rochester’s St. Luke and St. Simon Cyrene Church on South Fitzhugh Street. Built in the 1820s, “Two Saints” is the oldest building still in use in our city. According to Publick Musick’s co-artistic director Haritatos, “it’s a beautiful acoustic and a beautiful ambiance for our concerts.” 

Future Publick Music concerts will include a spotlight on music for the viola (March 7 and 8) and a celebration of the Memorial Art Gallery’s organ with several concertos by English composers (Charles Avison included) on May 21.

Pegasus Early Music’s opener,“Darpana,” is “different from anything else we’ve done before,” says Fox, the group’s artistic director.

The Oct. 19 concert, subtitled “Mirroring Traditions of Raga & Harmony,” is indeed different, bringing together traditional Indian classical music and musicians with Western period instruments.

The word “mirroring” is carefully chosen, according to Vidita Kanniks, an Indian classical vocalist who is one of the guest artists for “Darpana.” (The other is Indian percussionist Rohan Krishnamurthy.) The word in fact means “mirror” or “opposite.” The program grew out of conversations between Kanniks and Fox about their musical backgrounds. They found an important point in common: both Indian and Western early classical music rely heavily on ornamentation and improvisation to add expressiveness to plain melodies.

The sounds of Indian music are somewhat familiar to Americans from borrowings and echoes in pop music and movie scores.

“It has made its mark on the world,” Kanniks notes, but she adds that Indian classical music has traditions as venerable and forms as complex as Western classical music. And despite their fundamental differences in scales and modes, harmonies, and musical forms, they also share some musical building blocks.

Indian classical music was traditionally taught by ear and by example, as was the earliest Western classical music.

“One important thing they have in common with Western historical practice is the tradition of listening to learn nuances of style and performance practice,” Kanniks says.

The “mirroring” of these traditions will be explicit in several vocal numbers joining Kanniks (who is also a trained early-music soprano) with soprano Andréa Walker in a kind of cross-cultural sing-off, but the idea pervades the entire concert.

For “Darpana,” Kanniks is providing her own arrangements of Indian music re-imagined for period instruments. One set features songs that came to India in the 19^th century from England and France. One Indian composer took these tunes—very familiar ones like “God Save the Queen” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” —and set sacred Sanskrit words to them to create an interesting hybrid of Europe and India.

 “It was one of the more benign effects of colonialism,” says Kanniks.

“Darpana” ends with one of Claudio Monteverdi’s most popular madrigals, “Zefiro torna,” a tribute to the breezes of springtime. Kanniks calls it “everybody’s favorite chaconne”; like many rock tunes, it’s built on a constantly repeating bass, making it an ideal vehicle for an Indo-European jam session involving all the musicians, including (or perhaps especially) Krishnamurthy’s percussion.

“Each of these traditions offers beauty in its own way,” says Fox. “They’re similar, but they’re not connected or mutually influenced. We’ll simply bring them together in a speculative, playful program, mirroring each other, and let the music speak for itself.”

The rest of the Pegasus season (its 21^st) returns to more familiar European musical traditions, from Christmas music at the court of Henry VIII to a springtime program of music for voice and cornetto (a forerunner of the modern trumpet), a popular 17^th-century pairing. The highlight is a festival celebrating the 400^th anniversary of the death of John Dowland, the great English composer of lute songs, which will include a recital by Eastman’s world-famous lutenist, Paul O’Dette.

Publick Musick presents “Opus 1” on Saturday, Oct. 4 at 4 p.m. at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 21 Clara Barton St., Dansville; and Sunday, Oct. 5 at 3 p.m. at Episcopal Church of St. Luke and St. Simon Cyrene, 17 South Fitzhugh St., Rochester. Admission is free; $20 donation suggested.

Pegasus Early Music presents “Narpana: Mirroring Traditions of Raga and Harmony” on Sunday, Oct. 19 at 4 p.m. at Downtown United Presbyterian Church, 121 North Fitzhugh St. Pre-concert talk at 3:15 p.m. Tickets at pegasusearlymusic.org or at the door.

David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.

The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing  [email protected].