Keeping it real
SANTA FE PRO MUSICA BAROQUE ENSEMBLE
Santa Fe Pro Musica Baroque Ensemble
ON the three days leading up to Easter Sunday, Santa Fe Pro Musica presents its annual Baroque Holy Week series in Loretto Chapel, featuring both religious and secular works. The program, which includes six works by three Baroque masters — Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), and Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) — will be performed by the Santa Fe Pro Musica Baroque Ensemble and soprano Kathryn Mueller. “The central theme for these concerts is Holy Week,” said Pro Musica’s co-founder and music director, Thomas O’Connor, “but we try to create programs that offer a measure of variety both in instrumentation and effect.”
Part of the appeal of this series, which premiered in 1982, is its feeling of authenticity. The six-member ensemble, an offshoot of Santa Fe Pro Musica’s 35- to 45-member chamber orchestra, performs on period instruments such as the Baroque violin and chest organ. “Modern instruments have evolved qualities of projection,” O’Connor said, “whereas period instruments have unique qualities of blending together and tend to have a richer palette of nuances. In the mid-1990s, Santa Fe Pro Musica started offering period-instrument performances in Loretto Chapel, and we soon discovered that it was the best performance space for these types of instruments. The sound is warm and reverberant, and the experience for the audience is intimate.”
Three works by Handel make up the first half of the Holy Week program: the Concerto in G minor, HWV 289; the aria “Süsse Stille” (Sweet Silence), and the Sonata in G Major, HWV 399. “The two instrumental pieces reflect the effervescent Italian style Handel absorbed in his early years while living in Italy,” O’Connor said, referring to the period before the German-born composer permanently settled in London. “Süsse Stille” is the first of two pieces sung by Mueller — who specializes in Baroque music and made her first appearance with Pro Musica in December 2008 (on the companion series Baroque Christmas). It describes “how a fine moonlit night in spring follows the work of day, just as eternal peace awaits us after a life of toil,” O’Connor said. Mueller cited the piece as portraying “a perfectly peaceful kind of joy” and said that its text, written by the German poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747), is “religious poetry that’s full of beautiful nature imagery.” Next up are two works by Vivaldi: the Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro (At the Holy Grave) and the Sonata al Santo Sepolcro. The subtitle of these works, O’Connor said, “refers to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,” which is said to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and tomb. “We know Vivaldi as a great composer,” O’Connor added, “but he was also a priest. He was known as the Red Priest because of his [red] curly locks.” Venetian-born Vivaldi was a violin virtuoso, a longtime music teacher at Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice, and a prolific composer. He was ordained as a priest in 1703, at the age of twenty-five, but stopped saying Mass about a year later due to ill health.
The final piece of the concert is Bach’s “Ich habe genug” (I Have Enough), which again features Mueller, who described this cantata as “a profound work of art. The middle aria is on my list of most ravishing pieces of music ever written.” Mueller also noted that the piece “is more commonly performed in its original version for bass soloist, oboe, and strings, but, luckily for me, Bach was practical and produced a version for soprano, flute, and strings, so [Pro Musica’s principal flute] Carol Redman and I will perform it together.” Bach wrote “Ich habe genug” in 1727, when he was music director at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, in celebration of the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. It expresses “the struggle between worldly life and the yearning for death,” O’Connor said, noting that the final aria is joyful and concludes with the text, “With gladness, I look forward to my death. … Then shall I escape all despair that enslaves me here on earth.”
For Mueller, one of the joys of Baroque music is that it affords her artistic freedom as a performer. “There’s the freedom — the expectation, really — to add ornamentation, which is a lot of fun. I love singing high notes, so in secular Baroque music I try to add as many as taste will allow. But there’s also freedom of expression. Unlike in music of other periods, the singer doesn’t have to be vocally perfect and beautiful at all times. I can use different vocal colors, alternate straight tone and vibrato, even bend intonation a little, to portray the emotional content of the music.”
O’Connor said that, for him, Baroque music is rewarding for a number of reasons. In his scores, O’Connor said, “Bach wrote ‘Soli Deo Gloria,’ which means ‘To the Glory of God Alone.’ This sense of composing for a higher purpose beyond ego and materialism sets much Baroque music apart from that of other eras. Mix the German intellectual approach with the expressive exuberance of the Italian style and the subtle and nuanced French style,” he said, “and you have a repertoire rich in variety, energy, and meaning.”