Baroque Easter concert highlights German works
What: Victoria Baroque Players: Music for Passiontide and Easter When/where: Sunday, 8 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine (1611 Quadra St.) Tickets: $27, concession $24, students and children $5. In person at Munro’s Books, Ivy’s Bookshop, and Long and McQuade
The Victoria Baroque Players, our homegrown period-instrument ensemble, made its debut in April 2011 with a program titled Bach on Palm Sunday, and for the next two years it continued to offer an Easter-themed all-Bach concert in the spring.
But last April, it began to mix things up a little, with an Easter program that put Bach in the context of other German Baroque music by his older contemporary Dieterich Buxtehude.
This welcome trend will continue on Sunday, when the VBP will offer its most multifarious Easter program to date, a nicely judged selection of Baroque sacred works ranging widely in various respects, albeit within a range of topics and expression appropriate to the religious season.
The focus remains on German composers, however. Even the one exception, the Czech-born Jan Dismas Zelenka, spent more than half his life based in Dresden.
On this occasion, the various solo vocal parts will be performed by five students from the studios of Nancy Argenta and Benjamin Butterfield, and the available instrumentalists will be unusually numerous, with regular VBP members joined by a handful of guests including Natalie Mackie (cello and violone) and Michael Jarvis (organ), both from Vancouver.
Past Easter concerts of the VBP mostly included works few in number but substantial in size.
Indeed, the 2013 concert comprised nothing less than Bach’s St. John Passion— the ensemble’s most ambitious undertaking to date. This year’s program, however, includes a larger number of works, and the “size” of the music varies from modest to grand.
The most intimate offerings will be two lovely, gentle arias by Bach, from the St. John Passion (the popu- lar Ich folge dir) and the Easter Oratorio, as well as one of Zelenka’s deeply expressive Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah for Holy Week, a set of six short cantatas he composed to Old Testament texts in 1722.
The Zelenka will be performed by tenor Josh Lovell, one of the most promising young singers in town, accompanied by two flutes, two cellos and basso continuo.
Of the two works by Buxtehude on Sunday’s program, one is the chorale setting Walts Gott, mein Werk ich lasse, scored for fourpart choir with a very lean accompaniment, just two violins and basso continuo.
In this case, the “choir” will comprise solo voices only, but that is no scandal: One early definition of a choir was simply whatever minimum number of voices were required to sing a given piece.
And here a one-on-a-part vocal ensemble is well suited to the modesty of the music.
Three other works on the program will feature more conventional choral forces. As always in its Easter concerts, the VBP will be joined by the resident chamber choir of its regular venue, the Church of St. John the Divine, led by the church’s organist and music director, David Stratkauskas.
The most lightly accompanied of these three works is also the most vocally complex and interpretively challenging, and surely counts as the masterpiece on Sunday’s program: Bach’s motet Komm, Jesu, Komm! for double choir and basso continuo, a profound exercise in expressive text setting, contrapuntal art and the textural possibilities of two choirs.
One more step up the grandeur scale is Buxtehude’s Jesu, meines Lebens Leben, a set of ground-bass variations scored for choir, strings and basso continuo. And grandest of all is Johann Kuhnau’s Gott sei mir gnädig, from 1705, which requires both solo and choral voices as well as strings and basso continuo. This cantata, a continuous series of little choral numbers and solo recitatives and arias, will open the concert.
Smack in the middle of all this sacred vocal music will be a little island of secular instrumental music: the sinfonia that concludes the Premiere Production (first book) of Telemann’s Musique de table, from 1733.
This bustling, passionate piece will be a virtuosic showcase for two flutists, including Soile Stratkauskas, the outstanding Finnish-born Baroqueflute specialist who founded the Victoria Baroque Players.