HANDLING HANDEL
Event will showcase new musical partnership
Early Music Vancouver and Pacifique Baroque Orchestra bring out musical fireworks for Handel concert.
Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks April 3, 3 p.m. | Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC Tickets and info: from $17.50, earlymusic.bc.ca
King George II desired a fine spectacle for an April evening and the amusement of the London populace to mark the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. Fireworks — so much more special and magical in the centuries before electricity — would be just the thing, especially since the aging George Frederic Handel would provide the soundtrack.
Early Music Vancouver and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra will recreate the musical side of the event at the Chan Centre. The plan is both to showcase Early Music Vancouver’s new relationship with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, and to feature some young players from the UBC Baroque Mentorship Orchestra program.
As long ago as the early 1980s, during the brief tenure of conductor John Eliot Gardiner, Vancouver’s CBC Radio Orchestra began exploring ideas about historically informed performance. Gardiner went on to a career of exceptional brilliance; the CBC ensemble reverted to conventional practice. Then, in 1990, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra was established.
With the rise of specialist orchestras, the question of how best to train string players is a matter of considerable discussions. It used to be that younger players were schooled in a sort of one-techniquefits-most styles approach. This doesn’t fly as well as it once did, given our everincreasing appetite for so-called “authentic” performances.
Thus the Pacific Baroque/UBC partnership is quietly revolutionary. I chatted with two students who will play alongside Pacific Baroque regulars Elana Cooper and Majka Demcak, both third-year violin majors. They are provided with reproduction instruments and bows, and Monday afternoons they participate in an extended strings-only session with Pacific Baroque conductor Alexander Weimann. Issues about period articulation, bowing techniques, ornamentation, and so forth, are considered through playing.
Both students are enthusiastic about the experience and its results. I asked how hard is it to switch gears between modern and baroque instruments. Not all that difficult, was the response, and the advantages greatly outweigh the occasional challenges. The project also makes good practical sense: There is always a need for orchestral string players to make up the core of any orchestral ensemble. Being musically bilingual in both historical and conventional techniques makes for greater post-graduation career opportunities. Cooper and Demcak will be on stage at the Chan demonstrating their Baroque playing chops in the concert, which also includes flashy music by J. S. Bach and Telemann.
When Handel was asked to create his now-famous score, George II expressed a royal wish that “there would be no fiddles.” Kings often get what they want: Handel’s original version employed an absolute plethora of winds, brass, and percussion: twenty-four oboes, twelve bassoons and a contrabassoon, nine natural trumpets, nine natural horns, three pairs of kettledrums, and side drums.
But the 1749 celebration didn’t go quite as planned. An outdoor rehearsal created a tremendous city-crippling traffic jam, as an estimated crowd of 12,000 tried to hear Mr Handel’s latest tunes. Apparently the event itself proved a bit of a flop, done in by London’s notoriously changeable weather, and the awkward fact that the purpose-built staging pavilion caught fire in mid-exhibition.
Handel seemed unconcerned. A master musical recycler, he quickly reworked the piece for indoor performance, adding strings and reducing the wind complement. A few weeks later, this more sophisticated version was performed with great success (and considerable financial reward) in a benefit for London’s Foundling Hospital. And the revised piece has stayed near the top of the classical charts ever since.