A brand-new baroque orchestra, led by the RDSO’s Claude Lapalme, will enthusiastically perform on period instruments a “fun” piece Johann Sebastian Bach was reluctant to compose.
Bach’s famous work of melodious ear candy, Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B Minor, will be played by the new Rosa Barocca at the Purcell Prowess Concert on Saturday, Nov. 5, at Gaetz Memorial United Church in Red Deer.
The concert, which also features Calgary chorus VoiceScapes performing Henry Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia, combines orchestral and choral music. It’s being co-presented as part of the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra season by the RDSO and Early Music Voices Concert Society.
Rosa Barocca was formed last summer with about 20 musicians from across North America.
Hailing from Central Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge to as far as Seattle and Montreal, a few of them will be familiar faces to RDSO audiences, said Lapalme.
The conductor helped form the ensemble last summer because early music is growing in popularity and there’s a demand for orchestras that can reproduce the baroque sound — both for orchestral performances and as accompaniment for choral concerts.
Many musicians are also “passionate” about performing on vintage instruments — or reproduction ones are made through the same centuries-old processes to create rich, warm tones.
At this concert, seven members of the Rosa Barocca will perform Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2. Lapalme said the “fun piece” with a difficult flute solo is the composer’s smallest and most intimate overture, and was likely written as a people-pleaser for a garden party, festival, or trade show.
There’s a feeling Bach wrote the lighter work “kicking and screaming,” since it’s a departure from his graver compositions. But as Lapalme writes in the program notes, “for someone so adverse to writing such blatantly gallant music, Bach does an awesome job.”
Given the German composer’s surly temperament, it’s hard to know whether Bach would be flattered or appalled that some 320 years later, the melody of his final movement is being used as a Nokia cellphone ring tone.
Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia is a 50-minute choral work written in praise of the patron saint of musicians. Purcell turned a poem by Nicholas Brady (derived from an earlier work by John Dryden) into a musical ode that highlights the specific instruments mentioned by name in the stanzas of poetry.
For instance, Lapalme said a verse about violins originating from fir trees and recorders from box wood, will be accompanied by two pairs of solo violins and recorders.
The VoiceScapes professional music collective from Calgary will perform solos, duets and as an ensemble. The choir will be accompanied on this multi-mood piece by Purcell by a larger version of Rosa Barocca.
The singers will also tackle two shorter, more serious works for voice and organ — George Jeffreys’ A Musick Strange and John Blow’s O Lord, I have Sinned, which is based on verses from the Biblical Books of Job and Isaiah.
“There’s real musical diversity at this concert,” said Lapalme — from light-hearted pageantry to drama and emotion.
Tickets are available from the Black Knight Ticket Centre.
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com