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Salut! Baroque’s Sweet Melodies and Angry Tempests
April 23, 2023 @ 3:00 pm
Salut! Baroque’s 2023 series continues with Sweet Melodies and Angry Tempests concerts in Canberra and Sydney.
Singers of the Baroque period touched their audiences, transporting them from sweet melodies to angry tempests. Nuance and intuitiveness were key, with an inflection of the voice here, a gesture there. Jacopo Peri wrote in 1600 of ornaments as “those charms and elegances, which one cannot write down, and [if] written, one cannot learn them from the notation.” As singers saw opportunities to create performances full of extravagant theatrics, some composers remained sticklers for formality and restraint, with Lully declaring of his recitatives: “No embellishment! … I want it to be absolutely plain”. By the late Baroque period, composers began to regain control of their creative output, no longer leaving ornamentation to the discretion of the performers, with Marc-Antoine Laugier suggesting musicians “restrict themselves scrupulously to the notation before their eyes” (1754).
The program: Antonio Vivaldi – Allegro from Concerto RV 576/ Georg Frideric Handel – Aria Sweet Bird/Alessandro Marcello – Concerto in D minor/ Jacopo Peri – Tu dormi, e ‘l dolce sonno/Georg Philipp Telemann – Concerto in E minor/Johann Sebastian Bach – Aria Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen/Antonio Vivaldi – Aria In furore iustissimae irae/Giuseppe Tartini – Grave from Concerto in E major/ Giovanni Stefani – Madrigal Bella mia questo core
Canberra | Fri 21 April, 7.30pm; Gandel Hall, National Gallery of Australia
The performers: Anna Fraser, soprano/ Sally Melhuish and Hans-Dieter Michatz, recorders/ Sally Walker, baroque flute/ Jane Downer, baroque oboe/ John Ma and Julia Russoniello, baroque violins/ Suzie Kim, baroque viola/ Tim Blomfield, bass violin/ Monika Kornel, harpsichord