Alberta Baroque Ensemble with Robert Uchida
Concert’s six works round out Baroque Ensemble’s 34th season
There’s something about Baroque music that goes with spring. There is, of course, Bach for Easter, but all those wonderful Baroque concertos seem to express the exuberance of new life bursting out. The sheer elegance of Baroque music, nature tamed, the Age of Enlightenment taking over, seems to banish the chaos of winter.
So it was at Alberta Baroque Ensemble’s concert on Sunday afternoon at Robertson–Wesley United Church. The snow clouds of the morning fled, the bright sun glowed gold through the stained glass, and the music was made to match.
The concert rounded off the Ensemble’s 34th season, and the six works formed a survey of the Italian Baroque concerto from the 1680s to 1733. The result was to show the evolution of the concerto form, from Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in D major, where the solo lines essentially flow out of the concerted ensemble, to the primacy of the individual in Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in D minor.
It was also a kind of musical map of Italy and its Baroque composers. The Roman Corelli was the elder statesman, suave and sophisticated, eschewing display (lovely phrasing from the Ensemble under conductor Paul Schieman here). Much the same could be said of his pupil Geminiani, from Luca, whose Concerto Grosso in E minor features the viola, and whose attractive rocking figures in the allegro could not disguise the stateliness learned from his teacher.
Along the way, the string ensemble of 13 players and harpsichord continuo was joined for Torelli’s Sinfonia in D Major by trumpeter Robin Doyon, playing the piccolo trumpet now normally used for Baroque works. Here was a new emphasis on the soloist, and on more extrovert effects, the brightness of the solo instrument reflecting the huge spaces of the cathedral at Bologna that Torelli usually wrote for.
And so to Venice, first for the robust music of Albinoni, showing, in the opening of the last movement of the Concerto a Cinque in G minor, op. 5 No. 11, the feature that he embryonically developed in concertos, and which Bach was to bring to fruition — the fugue.
It was the Venetian Vivaldi, though, who really established the primacy of the soloist, and for his exciting E flat major concerto, La Tempesta di Mare, the Ensemble was joined by Robert Uchida, the new concert-master of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
Here I have to admit to being a little disappointed, for I have greatly admired his playing in the Winspear. His sound is not the biggest, and that is not necessarily a disadvantage in Baroque music. But Vivaldi’s concerto is tempestuous, and the thinness of the tone didn’t quite work, however difficult the solo lines (and here the performance did start off with a veritable hurricane of fast tempos). Something seemed to click in the intermission, though, for when Uchida returned for Locatelli’s D Major Concerto, Op. 3 No. 1, the tone was richer, and he revelled in the fiendishly difficult solo writing. It is a strange work, its two long solo quasi-cadenzas rather reminding me of those very long jazz numbers where the players open with some standard sequence, and then let the drummer go solo on the drums for most of the piece.
The violin writing is as virtuosic as such solos, too, for Locatelli was consciously extending the upper range of the violin, while at the same time turning the soloist into a showpiece virtuoso. Uchida pulled it off with aplomb.
The packed church had the atmosphere of a congenial club, with someone happily knitting in the Corelli, and with many of the elderly audience clearly long-term regulars.
Would that there had been more young people there to experience such exuberant music and music-making — but what a great way to usher in spring.