music by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Stravinsky, Kenji Bunch

program

Johann Sebastian Bach Trio Sonata in G Major, BWV 1039
Antonio Vivaldi Trio Sonata in D Minor, op. 1 no. 12 “La Folia”
George Frideric Handel Trio Sonata in G Major, op. 5 no. 4
Alexander Woods, Aubrey Woods violin
Louis-Philippe Robillard cello | Haruhito Miyagi harpsichord

Igor Stravinsky Suite Italienne
Alexander Woods violin | Cahill Smith piano

Kenji Bunch Apochryphal Dances
Alexander Woods, Aubrey Woods violin
John T. Posadas viola | Louis-Philippe Robillard cello

program notes by Chris Myers

The composers of the Baroque period established the fundamentals of what we would come to identify as “classical music”. Throughout the 17th and early 18th century, we saw the emergence of familiar musical forms, styles, and ensembles.

We begin today with three examples of the most common Baroque chamber music genre: the trio sonata. As the name implies, these were typically written for three parts: two melody instruments and “basso continuo” (a chordal accompaniment generally played by a harpsichord, often reinforced with a cello on the bass line).

Some, like Bach’s Trio Sonata in G Major, BWV 1039, were structured in a four-movement form that might seem familiar to Mozart or Beethoven. But the Baroque trio sonata showed considerably more variety in structure than the Classical sonatas of later composers.

Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata in D Minor, op. 1 no. 12 “La Folia”, for instance, is a set of 19 variations on a popular Spanish dance melody. And Handel’s Trio Sonata in G Major, op. 5 no. 4 is a suite of dance music, including arrangements of the overtures from Handel’s oratorio Athalia (I. Allegro) and opera Parnasso in Festa (II. A tempo ordinario), as well as part of the ballet from his opera Radamisto (III. Passacaille).

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When Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Igor Stravinsky to arrange some Italian baroque music, he expected nothing more than a “stylish orchestration.” What he received was not so much stylish as stylized. The score for Pulcinella was something new — not an original composition, but more than just an arrangement. The baroque music was still there, but it was costumed in effects and harmonies that would have been unfamiliar to the original composers.

At this time, composers were obsessed with exoticism — adapting and incorporating elements of music from other cultures. But as foreign sounds became more familiar, there were fewer new places to “travel.” In Pulcinella, Stravinsky found the answer. If space travel no longer accomplished the goal, why not try “time travel”?

Critic Constant Lambert commented that Stravinsky was “like a child delighted with a book of 18th-century engravings, yet not so impressed that it has any twinges of conscience about reddening the noses, or adding moustaches and beards in thick black pencil.”

Pulcinella marked the end of Stravinsky’s “Russian” period. He referred to it as “my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course — the first of many love affairs in that direction — but it was a look in the mirror, too.” The neoclassicism created in this score (later arranged for violin and piano as the Suite Italienne) proved to be one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, with effects that continue to resound today, as we can hear in the Baroque-through-a-modern-lens sounds of Kenji Bunch’s Apochryphal Dances, composed in 2017.