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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-11-22 18:34:44
Nicholas McGegan Some might smile seraphically at the prospect of more Handel during the holiday season, others might vituperate cholerically at yet more Handel, but the combined forces of the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra and Harvard University Choir under the baton of distinguished early-music specialist Nicholas McGegan, OBE (currently music director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra) brought a sweet compromise—more Handel but not the usual suspects—to the precincts of Sanders Theater Sunday night: L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Handel’s 1740 “pastoral ode” after John Milton’s two separate poems from 1632, L’allegro (the merry one) and Il Penseroso (the thoughtful, or melancholic, one), with a third poem added by Handel’s friend and librettist Charles Jennens to apply an Enlightenment gloss of reason to the dichotomous humors and come to a happy medium. Jennens’s most brilliant stroke was to combine Milton’s two poems into a single text that alternates passages […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-10-20 15:33:20
First Church Becomes Hermitage
The late Stephen Paulus (file photo) On Sunday at 4pm in First Church, Cambridge, the Harvard University Choir, under the direction of Edward Elwyn Jones, will present Stephen Paulus’s church opera The Three Hermits. Based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy, the opera features a colorful cast of characters richly portrayed through Paulus’s striking music. The opera focuses on the themes of humility, tolerance, and servitude, making it of particular relevance in our current climate. The performance features soloists from the Harvard University Choir, alongside local favorites David McFerrin and Clare McNamara, and is free and open to the public. In response to our questions Jones submitted the following: It’s a wonderful piece and Paulus’s untimely death in 2014 was a great loss to the American musical scene; last time we did the Hermits he came and worked with the choir, which was a real treat. We are not […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2015-11-02 23:08:04
Mozart Triumphant and Updated
Amanda Forsythe (file photo) With every seat occupied, including those behind columns and upon the professionally vacant balcony-organ bench, one could be forgiven for wondering if the buzzing crowd shoehorned yesterday into Harvard’s Memorial Church had gathered for the deciding game of the World Series instead of a Mass for the Dead. But in fact, Mozart’s Requiem in performance by the Harvard University Choir and Grand Harmonie under Edward Elton Jones had summoned the capacity-plus crowd. Did some also come to hear how Robert Levin’s 1995 revised version had banished the earlier ministrations of Franz Xaver Süssmayr? I did. I raved in these pages about Grand Harmonie’s performance of Mozart’s Serenade for 12 Wind Instruments and Contrabass, so my curiosity was piqued about how the ensemble would fare in an accompanying role, and whether its relatively new period-infused string division meets the ensemble’s very high standards. And what of the […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2015-10-10 04:26:11
Grand Partaking of Mozart a Brilliant Solitaire
[…] are the differences in the acoustics of the two spaces, and will that affect your playing? St. Peter’s is smaller and more intimate, but the large amount of wood in the sanctuary gives both a resonance and a wonderful clarity. We performed Mozart’s piano quintet there last season and even the smallest nuances of the fortepiano were clearly audible. Memorial Church is a favorite of Grand Harmonie—many of our members have performed there with the Harvard University Choir in large Baroque and early Classical programs. It’s larger, so it’s easier to envelop the audience in a wash of sound, which happens so often in the introduction to the first movement. But I expect we’ll need to pay more attention to projecting nuances of articulation, and maybe adjust some tempos downward. Are you commissioning any new music for old instruments? That’s a really interesting direction, but not one which Grand Harmonie […]
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