Couperin is star of Baroque Festival
What: Pacific Baroque Festival: Le Grand Siècle-Music in the Glow of the Sun King.
When/where: Today, 11 a.m., Alix Goolden Hall; Today, 8 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral; Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., AGH; Sunday, 4:30 p.m., CCC; evenings, pre-concert talks 7:15.
Tickets: Thursday $25, seniors and students $20; Friday and Saturday $30/$25; Sunday by donation; festival pass $100/$80. Call 250-386-5311; online at ticketfly.com; in person at the Victoria Conservatory of Music box office, the Christ Church office, Ivy’s Bookshop, Munro’s Books, Long & McQuade and Tanner’s Books.
French Baroque music is being performed here with some frequency, by historically informed players who understand its very particular demands. The whole 2012 Pacific Baroque Festival, in fact, focused on repertoire from the time of Louis XIV, France’s “Sun King,” who reigned from 1643 to 1715.
This weekend, the festival will again focus on France, featuring repertoire spanning the century from the 1650s through the 1740s, with special emphasis on a composer whose 350th birthday is being celebrated this year: François Couperin (1668-1733).
Dubbed “le grand,” he was the outstanding member of an important family of French musicians active from the late-16th through mid-19th centuries. He brought several French genres to their pinnacle, was a crucial figure in synthesizing traditional French style with the newfangled Italian style of Corelli and fed into the fashionable galant style of the mid-18th century. His fame and influence spread around Europe (Bach was a great admirer) and his later champions included Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Milhaud, Bartók and Richard Strauss.
The festival’s artistic director, violinist Marc Destrubé, believes Couperin merits a place alongside Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. That isn’t hyperbole — if you think Couperin was just a purveyor of over-embellished rococo fluff, you haven’t been listening.
He was most prolific (and most celebrated) as a composer of innovative harpsichord music, and also wrote chamber music, smallscale secular and sacred vocal music and organ works, but no orchestral pieces, ballets or operas — he was apparently temperamentally unsuited to large forms.
What he did write, however, is polished to a degree rarely equalled in music history, and the range of his music is astonishing. One hears grandeur and nobility, sometimes searing emotional intensity, tenderness and delicacy, vibrant colours and playful wit, and always, everywhere, uncommon elegance and refinement.
The five concerts of this year’s festival will sample Couperin’s music generously, and give welcome attention to some of his lesser-known French contemporaries.
In this morning’s chambermusic concert, Destrubé will be joined by violinist Chantal Rémillard, gambist Natalie Mackie and harpsichordist Michael Jarvis. The program will include some of Couperin’s harpsichord pieces, a viola da gamba suite by his great older contemporary Marin Marais and three clever sonatas by JeanMarie Leclair, scored for just two violins without accompaniment.
Tonight, Alexander Weimann, the Vancouver-based keyboard player and conductor and artistic director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, will give an organ recital mostly comprising Couperin’s two magnificent settings of the Ordinary of the Mass. These were intended as liturgical music, with their various short movements alternating with plainchant — and so they will be performed, with the Victoria Children's Choir directed by Madeleine Humer. Weimann will also play pieces by Bach and Louis Couperin, François’s uncle.
Friday’s all-Couperin concert will sample the vocal and instrumental chamber music he created for the French royal court, where he held positions as an organist and chamber-music composer. Destrubé, Rémillard, Mackie and Jarvis will reunite to perform L’impériale, one of the four long, rich trio sonatas in the set titled Les nations. Interspersed among its movements, and featuring sopranos Hélène Brunet and Catherine Webster, will be the three Leçons de ténèbres, intimate, gorgeous settings of part of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, originally intended for special Holy Week services.
Saturday’s concert will include instrumental and sacred vocal music by Couperin, Rameau, André Campra and Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville, plus Les élemens (1737), by Jean-Féry Rebel, a programmatic orchestral suite inspired by the traditional four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. (The piece begins by depicting Chaos through a dissonant chord comprising every note of a D-minor scale.) This will be the festival's grandest concert: Brunet and Webster will be joined by tenor Benjamin Butterfield, baritone Nathan McDonald, the Victoria Children’s Choir, the men of Christ Church Cathedral’s St. Christopher Singers and an instrumental ensemble directed by Destrubé.
As usual, the festival will close with an expanded version of Christ Church’s regular Sundayafternoon Choral Evensong service, featuring the St. Christopher Singers in beautiful sacred music by Couperin, Jean-Joseph Mouret, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Henry Du Mont, as well as pieces by Du Mont for viols and continuo.