SOUND OF THE SEASON
Festive celebration goes for baroque
Fans of baroque music enjoy a long tradition in Vancouver — every year we look forward to an extravagant just-before-Christmas production from Early Music Vancouver.
This year it's An Italian Baroque Festive Celebration, with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó. While the audience will be in no position to greet old friends and reminisce in person, EMV's holiday treat will stream on Dec. 23.
The cantata initiative started in 2004. Performances of Handel's Messiah had become a local Christmastime event, shared annually by local choirs in a sort of informal rotation sequence. EMV decided to add to the fun by offering music for the holidays from the prolific pen of J.S. Bach.
“The Bach Cantata Project, like many of the more interesting concerts in the history of Early Music Vancouver, grew out of an idea of Ray Nurse to present a concert of early Bach cantatas following recent research, with one-on-a-part singers and instrumentalists,” says José Verstappen, artistic director emeritus of EMV.
“Altogether there have been 18 concerts in the Bach Cantata Project — most of them under the name Festive Bach Cantatas for Christmas — initially led by Ray Nurse, and later on, when we started to present larger-scale cantatas at the Chan, under the direction of Marc Destrubé. They have always been very special to me.”
Given some 200-plus cantatas in Bach's catalogue, there was lots of excellent music to choose from. He produced wonderful works for the 12 days of Christmas, plus Advent and other occasions. Even performing three or four a year, the resources seemed inexhaustible.
The cantata project also brought together favourite EMV singers and instrumentalists, an illustrious cast of characters that morphed over the seasons.
When Verstappen handed over the reins to Matthew White, a change in focus reinvigorated the project. White cautiously moved away from exclusive focus on Bach to include other baroque masters, and several really grand EMV projects were smash hits: Christmas in Gabrieli's Venice last year; A Monteverdi Christmas Vespers the year before that; and Praetorius Christmas Vespers in 2015 — all splendid extravaganzas that packed the Chan Centre with appreciative listeners, and were taken on the road to other appreciative northwest centres. But what to do for Christmas 2020?
Anticipating that a streamed project would reach far beyond a single live audience, the idea is to sandwich a relatively unfamiliar showcase for mezzo-soprano Alessandro Scarlatti's Cantata pastorale per la Natività, between two familiar baroque favourites, Arcangelo Corelli's Concerto fatto per la notte di Natale and Georg Frederick Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6 No. 8.
The Corelli is essential holiday listening for many of us, with its tangible sense of anticipation plus one of the most charming finales in all Italian baroque music.
Corelli ended with a “pastorale” that referenced a localized Italian practice:
“Peasants from the countryside would descend upon the churches of large towns and cities such as Rome on Christmas Eve,” Justin Henderlight notes in his program notes for the concert.
“Both Alessandro Scarlatti's Cantata Pastorale and Arcangelo Corelli's so-called “Christmas Concerto” reference the sound of bagpipes by imitating the drone pipes of such instruments, particularly in the last movement of each piece. There are no overt references to peasant buskers in Handel's concerto, but a lovely Siciliana movement is very much in the pastoral — and Corellian — mode.
And, as if this wasn't quite enough to celebrate, EMV had a pre-holiday surprise up its sleeve. Last week it was announced that renowned singer Suzie LeBlanc will succeed Matthew White as the organization's new leader.
LeBlanc is well known to West Coast audiences, and news that she will be moving here during the holidays is a glad tiding of great joy indeed.