Report from 3rd Catacoustic Scholarship Winner, Michael Zaret

Many years ago (like back in the late 1970s), I was deeply involved in Early Music performance. Five students at CCM formed an ensemble, Musica Camerata. During our five years as a group we performed numerous concerts from New York to Florida, and Philadelphia west to Texas, including a stop in St. Paul to play on “Prairie Home Companion” and “Baroque and Beyond.” Unfortunately, our members eventually dispersed to various new locations around the country. That and increasing family responsibilities drew me away from Early Music performance. A couple of years ago, I heard Annalisa and Elizabeth Motter perform at a local library, and my interest was rekindled. However, my set of almost 40-year-old Baroque Moeck Rottenburgh recorders were in dire need of repair and revoicing.

Thanks to the Catacoustic Scholarship, I was awarded a grant to make them playable. So off they went to Boston and the Von Huehne Workshop, where they were revoiced and a key was added to the tenor recorder to compensate for my aging, shrinking fingers. In addition, a thumbhole ring was installed on my well-worn alto.

Fipple, with block removed

the block(curved side)- is inserted into fipple

What is revoicing, you might ask? Revoicing a recorder involves removing the block (the wooden piece that fits into the mouthpiece and shapes and steers the airstream) and ensuring that all the surfaces of the windway are clean and smooth and properly shaped to ensure the air from the windway is arriving at the edge (which sets it into vibration) correctly. The chambers at the exit end of the windway may be re-angled if necessary, and if the edge is damaged or swollen, re-cut.The end result is that revoicing makes a recorder play prettier! In the future, I hope to be able to send my Hopf Renaissance recorders in to also be repaired.

Block partially inserted into fipple

Recorder mouthpiece. Block fully inserted into fipple

I have had a busy year, playing with a variety of groups, both formal and informal. I’ve done some performing, and lots of practicing! I’ve also been practicing Baroque flute, but at this point, am not quite ready for prime time.

Again, I sincerely thank Catacoustic Consort for providing the spark to get me back into Early Music, and their generous grant to help make that happen!

Looking Back on the Cincinnati Early Music Festival, 2014

The Cincinnati Early Music Festival, 2014.  The word “doozy” comes to mind.  Also “humdinger.”  In the spirit of “Was it awesome or what?” I submit the following FAQs:

Was this the first or second early music festival?  This is the first year we were organized in advance.  In 2013 we promoted a collection of found objects.  (The fact that so many early music events were happening in the city in February 2013 was already a startling indication of how much the early music scene was taking off.)  So we’ll call this the 2^nd Annual, and look fondly back on our fledgling days. 

What are the numbers?  We held seventeen events, in twelve locations around town.  Some 320 performers performed.  And over 1500 people silenced their phones and listened.  My favorite number from that list?  The 320 performers.  This includes local high school and university chorists, possibly being exposed to early music for the first time; young, wide-eyed enthusiasts just starting to think that early music may play a huge role in their future; internationally recognized professionals who have devoted their lives to the music; experienced veterans of the early music rediscovery of the 1970s.  Everyone has a part to play.  

Did I hear a viola da gamba in there somewhere?  If you had gone to every single event this month, you would have heard pardessus de viole, treble viol, tenor, six-string bass, seven-string bass, great dooble bass, and violone. And as a bonus, a viol ancestor:  vielle.  Essentially the entire viol family, all performed by local Cincinnati musicians. Think about the worlds of possibility this opens up for the Cincinnati early music community.

What about other instrument families?  We also heard lute, archlute, theorbo, and viola da mano (which I am told is a lute/guitar hybrid).  We heard quite a range of recorders, and apparently the possibility of recorders in the city was underrepresented this year.  Let’s get the recorder family up and out!  We heard at least half a dozen early keyboardists playing harpsichords and period organs.  We heard Renaissance guitar and Baroque guitar, brass and an oboe d’amore, a 200-year-old cello, and large string ensembles.  Think of the things we can do with so much talent and ability all around us!

Who were the participating ensembles and organizations?  Where do I start? The Catacoustic Consort, of course.  Ubi Caritas.  Cincinnati Bach Ensemble.  Cincinnati Camerata.  Cincinnati Chamber Opera.  Cantantes Camarae.  Cantigium.  Harmonia Sacra.  Noyse Merchants.  Consort in the Egg.  Cincinnati Viol Consort.  The Knox Choir.  CCM Early Music Lab.  Cathedral Choir of St. Peter in Chains.  Collegium Cincinnati.  Edgecliff Vocal Ensemble.  Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy Encore Choir.  Xavier University Concert Choir.  And then there are all the ad hoc groups that came together to perform one special program of music. They’re everywhere!   

What were some memorable moments? 

--The Cincinnati Bach Ensemble performed Vivaldi’s La Notte flute concerto, with Randy Bowman on flute.  It starts with a slow movement (wha…?), goes on to a later movement that has no movement but is essentially shifting chord progressions, and contains the most impossibly long trills for the soloist—I was reaching under my pew for an oxygen mask, and I was just listening!  Well done, Randy!  

--The Knox Choir from Knox Presbyterian performed Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich, by Heinrich Schütz, an electrifying piece with the voices of the choir crying out the name of Saul over and over—again, so modern-sounding, and so compelling.  I’d love to hear that one again. 

--Elizabeth Motter performing Kapsberger’s Arpeggiata on Baroque harp with Annalisa, a piece that makes everyone put down what they’re doing and attend.  

--Jory Vinikour explaining why Rameau is the most important overlooked composer of the Baroque, and then explaining it again at the keyboard.  

--Scot Buzza explaining why Galuppi is one of the most important overlooked composers of the Baroque, and then explaining it again from the podium.  

--Bill Willits, lute, and Melisa Bonetti, mezzo, performing the gorgeous Isabel by Luys de Narvaez, and Scotty McEvoy reading a translation of the lyrics.  

--Cantigium’s performance of El Grillo by Josquin.  If you think eight people can’t sound like a chorus of crickets, you clearly missed this concert.  

--The incredible Luigi Rossi piece, Un ferito cavaliero, performed by Catacoustic Consort and Meg Bragle.  The cavaliero of the title is the messenger who brings news of the death of King Gustavus Adolphus; the song is about neither of these two men, but of the remarkable queen who must make sense of it all. The singer pleaded, thundered, wept, and finally whispered—I’ve never heard anything quite like it.

--The mass choir sing of Hieronymus Praetorius’ Jubilate Deo.  I was vibrating at the end, and couldn’t tell if it was my ears ringing, or the cathedral itself.

--La Musica, personified by Alexandra Kassouf, painting tears on the faces of the whole cast of L’Orfeo, and then the cast making us believe they were real.

--The generally heedless revelry of Cantantes Camarae, pitching their way through “He That Will an Alehouse Keepe,” “Ale and Tobacco,” and “Toss the Pot.”  English pubs in the early 17^th century must have been way fun.

Who is Sam Chan? He sight-read and goat-trilled his way through Classical Revolution, fooled everyone as the disguised Apollo in the opera, and led plainchant in the choral concert. Who was that masked man?  

If you were writing a Passion for all women, would you make Jesus an alto?  Heck, yes:  altos sit deepest inside the harmonies, and that’s exactly where Jesus would be.  Anna Little may be technically a mezzo, but it sounded like an alto part to me.

Will I always have to silence my phone at early music events?  Yes.

Is that it?  No more early music?  No! This is not just a foul weather pastime--these groups and others perform year round.  Catacoustic’s got an amazing concert coming up April 26.  Rumor has it that Cantigium may have a repeat of the Medieval concert in late March (yes, please.) Even Cincinnati Opera is doing a Baroque opera this summer!   Keep your eyes peeled, join Cincinnati Early Music Project group on Facebook, and keep the excitement going!

La Serenissima: Sacred Music of the Venetian Settecento

The Cincinnati Early Music Festival has featured concerts of music by composers you may not have known. Our final event will introduce you to several more.  This concert, at Saint Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Anderson Township (proud home of one of the finest organs in the city, prominently featured in the concert, http://www.sainttimothys.com/st-timothys-organ/ ) will see the North American premiere of seven long-forgotten works by Venetian composers of the 18^th century.  Cincinnati conductor and musicologist Scot Buzza has recently transcribed these lost choral works from manuscripts found in archives in Paris, Dresden, Munich, and Venice. 

Included in the program are works by Antonio Caldara (1670-1736), including a sepolcro, a subgenre of oratorio that was performed exclusively in the Hapsburg Court once a year, on Good Friday. Fewer than fifty were written, and this work was performed only once. Caldara used the orchestra to create a level of drama extraordinary for a sacred work.  Antonio Lotti’s (1667-1740) music was ahead of its time as well:  his use of dissonance in the vocal parts of his Credo was startling to the ears of his contemporaries, but spectacular to modern ears.  Ferdinando Bertoni composed his Vespers Psalm: Nisi Dominus in 1765. This charming work for choir and orchestra shows an unusual mixture of Baroque counterpoint and classical gestures, combined with bravura vocal writing. In the original score appear the names of the two sopranos for whom it was intended: Laura Risegari and Theresia Almerigo, both of whom achieved international fame during their lifetimes, despite the fact that neither ever stepped beyond the walls of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, where they lived and performed.

The centerpiece of the concert will be Galuppi’s extraordinary Passion for Good Friday.  This piece was composed some time before 1750, also for the women of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti.  It was written for four-part women’s chorus and continuo, with all solo parts sung by women, including Jesus and Pontius Pilate--a radical departure from church music of the time. Another Galuppi piece, Vespers Psalm: In convertendo Dominus, written in 1771, is at times light-hearted, at times fiery, and always full of the charm for which Galuppi was famous. 

Baldassare Galuppi is still largely unknown in this country, but during his lifetime, 1706-1785, he was immensely famous, working not only in Venice but also Vienna, London, and St. Petersburg.  He composed an enormous body of music, religious and secular, vocal and instrumental, and he is considered to be the father of comic opera. He was beloved by his acquaintances and fought over by his employers.  But his job description required a constant supply of new music, so each work, as complex and acclaimed as it may have been, was quickly superseded by the next piece, and was filed away and forgotten.  Much of Galuppi’s oeuvre has been relegated to dusty monastic archives, where it has been awaiting rediscovery for almost 230 years.    

In addition to hearing music no one has heard for centuries, you will also hear the stories that come with them. Stories of Masses sung 300 years ago in a Latin cleverly manipulated to be completely comprehensible to the Italian congregants. Of following the trail of Napoleon’s armies 200 years ago when they commandeered manuscripts from Venetian libraries and took them back, sight unseen, to France. Of last summer, when boxes full of brittle, yellowing pages were thumped down on long wooden tables with the cheerful warning, “We close for lunch at 2!”  Of the excitement of holding faded, scribbled scores in the composer’s own handwriting that no one had ever copied out before.  

On March 2, the closing day of the Festival, Buzza will conduct a full Baroque orchestra and two choirs in a concert of music that tells all these stories and more.  All of this music will be a North American premiere, and some of it has never been played or heard anywhere in the world in 250 years.  Be among the first people in a dozen generations to hear this luscious music. Be a part of the discovery.  

Sunday, March 2, 3:00, St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, Anderson Township
8101 Beechmont Avenue 45255

A Concatenation of Choirs

Music was invented for choirs.  When the first glimmerings of the modern musical staff were being codified by Guido d’Arezzo sometime around the year 1000, it was choral music he was trying to preserve.  And in the following centuries, it was choral music that fascinated the most important composers.  From the unison of plainchant, to the chords of organum, to the increasingly sophisticated polyphony of motets and madrigals, choral music was the undisputed glory of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  It didn’t stop there, of course.  Even as the importance of instrumental music was on the rise, late Baroque composers like Bach and Handel still used the choir to express some of their most exquisite ideas.  Hallelujah!

  

On Feb 23, choirs from around the city will come together and explore the riches of early choral music.  We will hear music from many countries and across the centuries, spanning over 400 years of changing styles.  The concert will take place in St Peter in Chains Cathedral, a great stone vault that will allow the music to sound as it did when it was new.

Participating in the concert are the following choirs:  The Cathedral Choir of St Peter in Chains.  The Edgecliff Vocal Ensemble and Concert Choir, the two lead choirs from Xavier University.  Collegium Cincinnati, a professional choir led by Christopher Eanes.  And Encore, the auditioned upper choir of Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy.  

The oldest piece on the program is “Gaudete,” an anonymous song published in Piae Cantiones, a Swedish collection of medieval music.  Another early piece is “Ave Maria – Virgo Serena” by Josquin des Prez, one of the most famous pieces written in the 1400s.

the Orpheus Britannicus

One hundred years later, Palestrina arose as the great Italian composer of his time, and we will hear from him as well.  Fifty years after that, Hans Leo Hassler left his native Germany to study in Italy, and his melding of German and Italian sensibilities bridged the transition from Renaissance to Baroque music in Germany.  And at the end of the 17^th century, Henry Purcell became the greatest English composer for many generations.  He composed his Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary in 1695.  And so we come to Bach.  His cantata 196, “Der Herr denket an uns" was composed around 1708, and is rarely heard today.  

Thomas Tallis

In addition to all this amazing music by the individual choirs, they will all join forces in two great works that are rarely performed, as they require great numbers of singers.  Michael Praetorius composed his “Jubilate Deo” for six parts in three choirs in the first years of the 17^th century.  And in a class by itself is “Spem in Alium”, or “Hope in No Other.”  The story goes that a travelling Italian composer at Elizabeth I’s court led a performance of his piece for 30 voices, and the Duke of Norfolk wondered if an English composer could do better.  Up stepped the great Thomas Tallis, who composed his own work for 40 voices.  That’s 40 interweaving lines of polyphony, the principal voice moving around within the group, combinations emerging and then disappearing, the fullness of the music waxing and waning. It is an extraordinary work from the 1570s, and most people will never hear it performed live.  Of course in Cincinnati we’re not most people.    

Sunday, Feb 23, 3:00pm.  St Peter in Chains Cathedral, 325 West 8th Street.  Free to the public, but a freewill offering will be accepted.

Cincinnati Early Music Festival Week Four

This final week of the Cincinnati Early Music Festival is truly an embarrassment of riches.  I’m afraid I’m going to have to suggest that you attend them all.

William Byrd

Cantantes Camarae is a chamber choir devoted mostly, though not exclusively, to early music.  They will be performing in Pleasant Ridge, in a program of John Bennet, John Blow, Henry Purcell, Thomas Ravenscroft, William Byrd, and Johann Hermann Schein —so, lots of English music, with a little German thrown in.  This will be an intimate event in a lovely venue.  http://catacoustic.com/ai1ec_event/cantantes-camarae/?instance_id=97

Friday, Feb 21, 7:00pm, All Saints Episcopal, Pleasant Ridge, free will offering accepted.

Thomas Tallis

For a bigger choral experience, Sunday afternoon is not to be missed.  A gathering of choirs from all walks—Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy, the Concert Choir and Edgecliff Ensemble from Xavier University, the Cathedral Choir of Saint Peter in Chains, and Collegium Cincinnati—will lift up their voices together.  Each group has chosen from the vast repertoire of 750 years of early music, so the music will range from the anonymity of the Middle Ages to JS Bach.  And it gets even better when they sing together, two works rarely performed because they call for so many independent parts.  Michael Pretorius’ Jubilate Deo was written for three choirs.  And Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium was written for 40 parts.  As you can imagine, these are not things you can hear performed live every day.  http://catacoustic.com/ai1ec_event/a-concatenation-of-choirs/?instance_id=98

Sunday Feb 23, 3:00pm, Saint Peter in Chains Cathedral, downtown, freewill offering accepted.

Then the Festival’s hosts, the Catacoustic Consort, will perform at last.  Catacoustic presented the wonderful Jory Vinikour concert earlier in the month, and we did get to hear Annalisa play, but this is a proper Catacoustic concert:  candlelight, lusciously Baroque music, a large consort including voice and a 14-string lirone.  Only one place you can get all that, my friends.  http://catacoustic.com/ai1ec_event/catacoustic-by-candlelight/?instance_id=59

Saturday, March 1, 7:30pm, St. Thomas Episcopal, Terrace Park, tickets $25, $10 for students with ID. Children under 12 free.

And that brings us to the end.  The final concert of this year’s Festival.  

Imagine you live in, say, Vienna.  You attend a concert with full Baroque orchestra, an exquisite organ, two choirs.  You hear music of Venice which has just been re-discovered in forgotten archives and locked libraries, and which is being performed for the first time in 300 years.  The music is extraordinary—Passion plays written for all-women’s choirs, Masses experimental in both their composition and their expression of the liturgy, a piece composed to be performed only on one specific day in 1717.  A nationally-known expert will present the background stories to go along with the music.  Even in Vienna, this kind of thing doesn’t come along every day. 

Mmmm...Sachertorte

 But wait!  You don’t live in Vienna!  Lucky you.  Because the concert I just described isn’t taking place there.  It’s taking place in Cincinnati.  The music that hasn’t been performed in 300 years?  It’s we who will be the first to hear it.  Not the Viennese.  Not New Yorkers.  Not Parisians.  You and I.  Other differences between the Austrian pretender and the real concert?  In Vienna you can probably get away with wearing real furs.  In Cincinnati, maybe not.  In Vienna you might arrive at the venue by streetcar.  In Cincinnati . . .  there’s ample parking.  In Vienna such a concert will cost at least €50.  In Cincinnati it is free and open to the public.  In Vienna there is Sachertorte.  

But forget Vienna!  Perhaps in your fantasy you live in Milan, or St. Petersburg, or Tokyo.  But if your fantasy is to attend possibly the most interesting early music concert happening anywhere in the world on this day, maybe you better thank your lucky stars you live in Cincinnati.   http://catacoustic.com/ai1ec_event/grand-finale-concert/?instance_id=99

Sunday, March 2, 3:00pm, St Timothy’s Episcopal, Anderson Township, free.