Baroque Players return to late 18th century
What: Victoria Baroque Players: Surprise Symphony When/where: Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine (1611 Quadra St.) Tickets: $28, seniors $25, students and children $5. In person at Munro’s Books, Ivy’s Bookshop, and Long & McQuade
The Victoria Baroque Players have been performing since 2011, and boast a repertoire that includes all sorts of European music from the later Baroque era — that is, from the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
But the ensemble marked a significant milestone in the first program of its 2013-14 season, when, for the first time, it programmed late-18th-century music in the Classical style; it did so again in its seasonopener last September.
Both of those Classical programs culminated in nothing less than a symphony by Haydn: respectively, No. 97 and No. 104, which were among the 12 symphonies he wrote for his two famously successful visits to London in the early 1790s — his last and grandest efforts as a symphonist.
No, the Victoria Baroque Players did not hire 75 guest performers on those occasions. Rather, they per- formed the symphonies in transcriptions for flute and string quartet by Johann Peter Salomon, the Germanborn violinist and impresario who brought Haydn to London and served as his concertmaster there.
The VBP’s dual breakthrough into Classical repertoire and transcriptions was clearly successful, since it spawned something like a tradition. This weekend, to launch its fifth season, it will once more offer a transcription-heavy Classical program culminating in one of Haydn’s “London” symphonies, this time No. 94, the so-called Surprise Symphony.
Again, Salomon’s flutequintet arrangement will be performed, with a bassoon added to give extra weight and colour to the bassline.
Such arrangements were popular in the Classical era, and it’s easy to understand why. Before the invention of recording, there were only two ways to listen to a piece of music: Play it yourself or be present while someone else played it. Opportunities to hear orchestral works in their original form were necessarily rare, but published reductions made the music available for chambermusic concerts and for performance and study at home.
Composers no less than publishers were eager to reap the financial benefits of transcriptions. Haydn signed over the rights to all of his “London” Symphonies to Salomon, giving him leave to do whatever he wanted to with the music in exchange for a share of the profits. And Salomon’s flute-quintet arrangements of these works, published beginning in 1798, were not his first or last efforts to exploit them.
Of the “London” Symphonies, No. 94, first performed in 1792, was (and remains) the most popular. Within Haydn’s lifetime, it was published not only in Salomon’s transcription but in reductions for piano solo, four-hand piano duet, piano duet with optional violin, piano trio, string quartet, and a quartet of piano, flute, violin and cello — and most of these appeared in multiple editions. There were yet more arrangements of various individual movements.
Historical transcriptions, if no longer of much practical value, remain intrinsically interesting, and recently they have begun to be performed and recorded with some frequency. This is welcome, not least because arrangements can throw fresh light on even the most familiar works.
Saturday’s program also includes contemporary chamber transcriptions of two other late-18th-century favourites — the overtures to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Magic Flute— as well as one of Mozart’s lovely flute quartets and a quartet for bassoon and strings by Carl Stamitz.
The latter will feature bassoonist Katrina Russell, while the Mozart quartet — like the Haydn-symphony transcriptions — will feature the VBP’s founder and artistic director, the outstanding Finnish-born flutist Soile Stratkauskas.
The purview of the Victoria Baroque Players has lately been expanding in other ways, too. For one thing, the ensemble performs occasionally outside Victoria, including in Nanaimo, where it will offer the Surprise Symphony program Friday evening. And last year, it recorded its first CD: Virtuosi of the Baroque, a program of concertos and other works by Fux, Graun, Graupner, Telemann and Vivaldi, directed by violinist Kati Debretzeni.
The CD has been nominated for the 2015 Western Canadian Music Award for Classical Recording of the Year, and, as it happens, those awards are being given out in Victoria this year, on Sept. 20. At 2 p.m. that day, at the Church of St. John the Divine, the VBP will participate in an hourlong concert showcasing the classical nominees; the award ceremony will follow.