Last Monday night at 7:30 the Houghton community was audience to a rare night of Baroque music courtesy of twice-Grammy-nominated period ensemble Europa Galante. Period-appropriate performance practice is a matter of involved study. Ensembles reviving Renaissance and Baroque music in period-appropriate performances have grown in popularity since the second World War. Despite interest falling off slightly since the 1990s, they now fit in with the mainstream of classical music.
Europa Galante was created by their director, Fabio Biondi, for the purpose of performing and reviving works from the Italian Baroque and early Classical period. With the Fondazione Santa Cecilia, Bondi and Europa Galante have worked to rediscover 18th century Italian operas by almost forgotten composers. They are one of the most widely acclaimed and awarded early music ensembles currently and have performed in La Scala in Milan, Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York. In fact, their next concert following the Houghton concert was in Carnegie Hall.
In a previous interview with Dr. Stephen Plate, director of the Greatbatch School of Music, about this year’s Artist Series concerts, he expressed his excitement at having an internationally-renowned group perform at Houghton and fulfill one of the goals of the Artist Series concerts, which is to bringing to Houghton performances not often found in western New York, much less Allegany county.
Their program Monday included Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos as well his oboe concerto in G. They played a similar program at Carnegie on Tuesday. “It has been so long since I have heard music like this!” said graduate organ/collaborative-piano major William Strydhorst. The selection is unique in period repertory for being a programmatic work, an instrumental piece based on a poem or story rather than preset form, over a hundred years before it became common practice. Their distinctiveness as well as the driving rhythms characteristic of Vivaldi’s music and characteristic Italian lines have ensured that these pieces have endured in the concert repertory for centuries. For some listeners, however, nothing is quite the same as hearing them performed on instruments they were made to be played on, making for a more accurate production of the music and enabling listeners to hear the music as the composer himself may have, or as near as can be had three hundred years later.
Europa Galante has been known for their performances of Vivaldi since their founding in 1990, recently receiving Grammy nominations for recordings of Vivialdi Concerti and Bajazet and most recently receiving the Diaspason D’Or for Vivaldi’s opera L’Oracolo. Monday’s performance displayed some of the reasons for these nominations. Fabio Biondi’s magical solos, particularly in “Winter,” mixed with the accompaniment of the ensemble. Biondi started performing internationally when he was 12, receiving continual acclaim since then.
The next Artist Series concert will be on March 29th featuring Houghton alumni Robert Joubert in the recital hall.
