Saturday,  October 28, 2023, Old South Church, Boston
Sunday, October 29, 2023, First Parish, Sudbury and Online

Suite from Les élémens                 André Cardinal Destouches (1672 – 1749)
    Ouverture • L’Eau • Suitte de Neptune        
    Troupe de Matelots • Premier air pour les Néréides
    Deuxième air • Troisième air pour les Divinitéz
    Rondeau

Domine, Dominus noster                 André Campra (bap. 1660 – 1744)
                                

L’Aprile                 Gregor Joseph Werner (1693 – 1766)
    La Primavera • Il pastore fischiante            
    Menuett • Tempo variable • Il grido Ranochio

Jonas                 Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665 – 1729)         

Concerto for flute, strings, and continuo La Tempesta di Mare                 Antonio Vivaldi (1678 – 1741)   
    Allegro • Largo • Presto        

Così sorgea from Serenata sull’Elba                Johann David Heinichen
                                (1683 – 1729)

 Agnes Coakley Cox, soprano
Suzanne Stumpf, traverso
Sarah Darling and Jesse Irons, violins
Marcia Cassidy, viola; Daniel Ryan, cello

Michael Sponseller, harpsichord

Program Notes

This program explores Baroque music inspired by the power of water and the living things that inhabit it. These varied works make effective use of the water theme in the contexts of liturgical vocal music, chamber cantata, ballet, serenade, and programmatic instrumental music. 
    Our opening work consists of excerpts from the opera-ballet Les élémens composed by André Cardinal Destouches in collaboration with Michel Richard de Lalande. Destouches was a prominent composer and administrator in the courts of Louis XIV and XV. Les élémens includes four entrées each devoted to one of the four elements. The dance movements comprise a significant portion of the work, and many of them were danced by the 11-year-old Louis XV. In the characterful dance movements of the L’Eau (Water) entrée, Neptune and the Nereids (sea nymphs) make dramatic appearances. 
    Destouches’ teacher, André Campra, was a native of southern France where he spent the first decades of his life working as a church musician in Aix, Arles, Toulouse, and Montpellier. In 1684, Campra moved to Paris, where he became an influential composer of opera-ballets, a form he is credited with inventing. He was also a prolific composer of sacred works, including dozens of motets for solo voices. His motet Domine, Dominus noster is a setting of Psalm 8 which includes evocations of the workings of nature. The phrase “the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea” is characterfully represented by smoothly throbbing passagework in the instruments. 
    Gregor Joseph Werner was an organist and composer who served as Kapellmeister of the Esterházy court when the young Joseph Haydn was hired in 1761. Though he served as a church music composer after Haydn’s arrival, Werner also composed symphonies and trio sonatas in which representational effects are used. His Neuer und sehr curios Musicalischer Instrumental-Calendar, published in 1748, consists of twelve suites, each representing a month of the year. The suite L’Aprile [April] opens with a depiction of the freshness of Spring with lively, imitative figuration. This lightheartedness continues in the second movement that conjures a whistling shepherd, featuring colorful bariolage violin passages over rustic continuo drones. Other movements include musical depictions of the variable April weather (through frequent changes in musical meter) and the sound of a chorus of frogs. 
    Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was a singer, keyboard player, and composer who was a child prodigy, having received her training and first performance opportunities at the court of Louis XIV. Her sacred cantata Jonas is from her second book of cantatas on subjects from scripture published in 1711. It tells the biblical story of Jonah in highly dramatic fashion. In the opening recitative, Jonah defies God’s command to go to Nineveh by embarking on a ship. A tempest is portrayed in the ensuing instrumental movement, followed by an aria depicting the sheer terror of the sailors. Jonah takes responsibility for the storm, saying “It is my crime whose pain you bear.” After Jonah is tossed into the sea by the sailors and a plea to calm the storm, the Almighty summons a sea monster to rescue Jonah, giving him refuge in “his enormous bulk,” thus enabling Jonah to survive and fulfill his God-ordained mission.
    A fair amount of mystery surrounds Vivaldi’s “Storm at Sea” concerto for flute, strings, and continuo. Among the hundreds of concerti composed by Vivaldi, many bear descriptive titles and involve  elaborate musical depictions, the most well-known of these being the “Four Seasons” concertos. As an opera composer, Vivaldi was certainly versed in creating dramatic musical scenes, and sea storms would have been part of his vernacular. Because Vivaldi would only have had limited exposure to the transverse flute in Italy, the specification of transverse flute for the work is intriguing. Although both the recorder and the traverso were forbidden from liturgical settings (considered “lascivious” by the Vatican), the recorder would have been more familiar to Vivaldi through secular concerts and private gatherings. The version of the work from which our performance is based is found in a 1728 Amsterdam publication by Le Céne, who may have been attempting to appeal to the many traverso players in northern Europe. Nonetheless, its setting in the key of F Major coupled with its type of figuration make it much more idiomatic for the recorder. In the Baroque custom of arranging and adapting, we have transposed the work to G Major and made a few minor adjustments to allow the work to flow more naturally on the traverso.
    Originally from Leipzig, Johann David Heinichen was a student of Johann Kuhnau at the Thomasschule there. In 1710, he traveled to Venice where he absorbed the Italian operatic style and came in contact with leading musicians. Our program closes with the aria Così sorgea, excerpted from Heinichen’s Serenata Sull’Elba. The work was performed as part of a festival in celebration of the goddess Diana during the elaborate wedding festivities of Crown Prince Friedrich August and Maria Joseph in 1719. The work was performed on a magnificently decorated ship in the form of a gigantic seashell as it drawn by “seahorses” down the Elbe River. On board, the royal musical ensemble was said to be dressed in green taffeta.    
        — Suzanne Stumpf and Daniel Ryan