Local music lovers can hear Juno Award-winning chamber group Rosa Barocca perform live at the next Red Deer Symphony Orchestra concert.
The Baroque Delights show on Saturday, April 29, at the Red Deer Polytechnic Arts Centre will feature the Alberta chamber group founded by RDSO music director Claude Lapalme and featuring musicians from the Red Deer area and across the province.
Rosa Barocca won a best classical recording (small ensemble) Juno last month for the Early Italian Cello Concertos CD. The recording project features Montreal cellist Elinor Frey. But as Frey was on a flight and couldn’t accept the Juno, Lapalme was left to say a few words of thanks at the podium.
Rosa Barocca, with its mission to present historically informed Baroque music on period instruments, will launch into some antique favorites at the Red Deer concert this month — including the Canon and Gigue by Johann Pachelbel and Antonio Vivaldi’s La Follia.
The exuberant Canon has provided the soundtrack to many a matrimonial ceremony over the last four centuries.
Its layered melody has an underlying three-part theme with a repeated bass line that goes through 28 canonic variations, as Lapalme explains in the program notes for the concert.
He compared it to the less glorious — but equally repetitive — Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
Although the Canon has assured Pachelbel’s musical immortality, Lapalme believes his sprightly, albeit less known Gigue, is also “masterly and attractive.”
Vivaldi, whose name is mostly associated with The Four Seasons, composed La Follia as his version of an unbridled Mediterranean dance of Portuguese origin that was later adopted by the Italians and all of Europe.
Lapalme stated, “It’s linked to the world of shepherds and peasants,” but gained theatricality in various interpretations.
For the second half of the concert, Rosa Barocca will perform Jean-Fery Rebel’s Suite from Les Elemens. This music was inspired by an opera-ballet from 1721 about air, water, fire and earth.
The dissonant opening is described by Lapalme as a “Big Bang moment” that must have shocked audiences at the time.
Bass instruments will portray earth, as various sized flutes imitate the course of water and the flow of air, and “bright and brilliant” violin strokes represent fire in this epic 23-minute work.
For more information about the show, please visit rdso.ca.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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