Bach solos with frogs and insects
There’s a long list of things that music can conjure up in the right compositional hands — a roster that includes such items as love, sorrow, exuberance and sex. Also, frogs and crickets. Leave it to Georg Philipp Telemann to tackle those last two, in a pair of instrumental pieces that got the American Bach Soloists’ annual Festival and Academy off to a charming start on Sunday, July 28. With
artistic director Jeffrey Thomas leading an ensemble of period instruments, animal sounds and Baroque harmonies kept pleasing company together at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Now, musical zoology has a long and noble pedigree, from the Renaissance right up to our own time. But it’s usually birds who get the starring role, followed by domestic and barnyard animals. It takes a while before amphibians and insects turn up in the rotation.
But on Sunday the frogs had their day in the sun, embodied by violin soloist Toma Iliev in Telemann’s Concerto in A, subtitled, yes, “The Frogs.” The composer’s ingenious stroke is to have first the soloist and then the rest of the string players, alternate rapidly between two adjacent strings of the instrument — sometimes playing the same pitch on both strings, sometimes moving in and out of unison.
The effect is to recast the surging rhythmic ululations of this swampy beast in musical terms, as if a whole chorus of animals had figured out the formal principles of a Baroque concerto and decided to put them into practice. As a special treat, the concerto winds up with a frogfree minuet of uncommon grace and beauty.
Less overtly imitative but decidedly more offbeat was another piece that Telemann dubbed a “Cricket Symphony.” It boasted an unusual complement of solo instruments comprising three woodwinds (Sandra Miller playing a Baroque piccolo, Debra Nagy playing the oboe and Thomas Carroll playing the light, clarinetlike chalumeau) alongside two ferocious double basses (Steven Lehning and Daniel Turkos).
There are chirruping crickets here and there, but most of the piece’s allure stemmed from the improbable sonorities that came from these soloists and the string ensemble. A tagteam wrestling match between double basses and highpitched woodwinds isn’t something you witness every day.
Animals were just a subsection (though admittedly the most interesting part) of the concert’s overall theme, which had to do with the sounds of nature in general. That included the pictorial swatches of “The Enchanted Forest,” a vivid though overextended musical suite from the 1750s by Francesco Geminiani, and Vivaldi’s familiar “Four Seasons,” which took up the program’s second half.
For this occasion the four violin concertos were each entrusted to a different soloist, beginning with Noah Strick’s suave account of “Spring” and continuing with a fiercely pointed “Summer” from Tatiana Chulochnikova and Elizabeth Blumenstock’s sagacious “Autumn.” But the highlight came last, as Rachell Ellen Wong brought flamboyance and tender eloquence to a rendition of “Winter” that brought the program to a thrilling conclusion.