 |
             
|
 |
||||
|
|
|
NewsPRESS RELEASE October 2009 Three-Time Grammy Nominee Boston Baroque performs Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 In New York City’s
BOSTON BAROQUE music director Martin Pearlman has announced that he will conduct the ensemble in his Grammy-nominated interpretation of Monteverdi’s masterpiece, the Vespers of 1610, in one New York performance only, on Saturday, March 6, 2010. The performance takes place in another masterpiece—the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, home of New York’s Episcopal Diocese and the largest cathedral in the world. With its extraordinary beauty and scale, the Cathedral will provide a dramatic setting for the Vespers, which, in its own time, brilliantly exploited the spatial and acoustical possibilities of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Marking both the 400th anniversary of the Vespers’ publication and Boston Baroque’s first performance in New York since the 1980s, this promises to be a major event in the city’s 2009-2010 early music and classical music calendar. Ticket information will be available at www.bostonbaroque.org in October. The performance will be presented as part of the BOSTON UNIVERSITY INCITE ARTS FESTIVAL, a New York showcase for the BU College of Fine Arts and its Schools of Music, Theatre, and Visual Art. Boston Baroque is the resident professional ensemble for Boston University’s Historical Performance Program, where it is helping to train the next generation of period-instrument performers. Martin Pearlman writes: “The Vespers is a work of extraordinary emotional power, astonishing for the grandeur of its conception and the opulence of its sound. No other surviving work from that period is written on such a scale, combining the grandest of public music with the most intimate of solo songs. Like the music itself, the performing forces are on a grand scale: seven solo singers; a chorus large enough to divide into anywhere from four to ten voice parts; and an orchestra with a rich variety of instrumental colors, including virtuosic solo parts for violins and cornetti.” More about Boston Baroque Founded by Martin Pearlman in 1973, Boston Baroque was the first Baroque orchestra established in North America and is now widely regarded as “one of the world’s premier period-instrument bands” (Fanfare). Boston Baroque reaches an international audience with its now-19 recordings on the Telarc label, three of which received Grammy nominations. The ensemble produces a subscription concert series in Greater Boston, now in its 36th season, and made its European debut in 2003, performing Handel’s Messiah to sold-out houses and standing ovations in Krakow and Warsaw, Poland. In 2004, Boston Baroque was acclaimed for its performances of the Monteverdi Vespers in three major American music centers: Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Ravinia; and Tanglewood. In 2009, the ensemble made its debut with two programs at the international Casals Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico—the first period-instrument orchestra invited to perform there. Of Boston Baroque’s recent recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Gramophone wrote “Under Pearlman, Boston Baroque’s playing combines supreme technical precision with unexpected psychological depth…[t]his new version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons may well represent the best of al possible worlds.” Boston Baroque’s 20th recording on Telarc, featuring male soprano Michael Maniaci in music by Mozart for the castrato voice, will be released in January 2010.
March 2009 Boston Baroque Makes Successful Debut at the
BOSTON BAROQUE made its debut at the international Casals Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with two concerts on Friday, March 13 and Saturday, March 14, 2009. BB’s engagement was at the invitation of Casals artistic director Justino Diaz, a veteran of Europe and America’s leading opera houses and principal singer at the Metropolitan Opera for 40 years who became familiar with Boston Baroque through its recordings. The March 13 evening program focused on music of Bach and Handel and featured Bach’s Sinfonia from Cantata BWV 42, Bach’s Concerto for violin and orchestra in E Major with soloist Christina Day Martinson, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, Handel’s Gloria for soprano and orchestra with soprano soloist Mary Wilson, and Bach’s ebullient Third Orchestral Suite. The March 14 evening program featured two major choral works: Vivaldi’s Gloria in D; and J.S. Bach’s Magnificat in D. Soloists for this concert were Mary Wilson, soprano; Leah Wool, mezzo-soprano; Mary Phillips, alto; Kerem Kurk, tenor; and David Kravitz, baritone. Artistic Director Diaz called the performances a “revelation” and linked Boston Baroque with Pablo Casals’ vision. Diaz wrote: “Boston Baroque is featuring the repertoire that Casals considered the culmination of European music. Its abundant forces—orchestra, chorus and soloists under Martin Pearlman—brings us close to such stellar composers as Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and so many other masters whose art defies the passage of time, never allowing us to forget the golden brilliance and all-enveloping sound of that musical universe.”
The reviewer for the San Juan newspaper El Nuevo Día wrote: “Violinist Christina Day Martinson’s … interpretation fully showed the baroque spirit, and the second movement was notable for a very expressive cantabile ... Soprano Mary Wilson captivated the audience with her vocal agility in the fast movements and her expressive phrasing in the slow ones … Pearlman’s interpretation [of Bach’s 3rd orchestral suite] emphasized the exuberance and majesty of the initial French overture … and avoided sentimentality in the famous Air. The three remaining French dances … were examples of dynamism and vitality. At the audience’s implicit request, the group offered as encore the last Allegro of the Concerto Grosso in G Major of Handel, demonstrating once more the authentic sound of the baroque.”
|
|
||