Boston’s Grammy-winning Handel and Haydn Society performs Baroque and Classical music with a freshness, a vitality, and a creativity that inspires all ages. H+H has been captivating audiences for 209 consecutive seasons (the most of any performing arts organization in the United States), speaking to its singular success at converting new audiences to this extraordinary music, generation after generation.

H+H performed the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah in its first concert in 1815, gave the American premiere in 1818, and ever since has been both a musical and a civic leader in the Boston community. During the Civil War, H+H gave numerous concerts in support of the Union Army (H+H member Julia Ward Howe wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) and on January 1, 1863, H+H performed at the Grand Jubilee Concert celebrating the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years later, H+H performed at the memorial service for Abraham Lincoln.

Today, H+H’s Orchestra and Chorus delight more than 50,000 listeners annually with a subscription series at Symphony Hall and other leading venues. Through the Karen S. and George D. Levy Education Program, H+H supports seven youth choirs of singers in grades 2–12, and provides thousands of complimentary tickets to students and communities throughout Boston, ensuring the joy of music is accessible to all. H+H has released 16 CDs on the CORO label and has toured nationally and internationally. In all these ways, H+H fulfills its mission to inspire the intellect, touch the heart, elevate the soul, and connect all of us with our shared humanity through transformative experiences with Baroque and Classical music.

Multi-talented Ian Watson has been described by The Times in London as a “world-class soloist”, performer of “virtuosic panache” and by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “a conductor of formidable ability.” He is Artistic Director of Arcadia Players Period-Instrument Orchestra, Music Director of the Connecticut Early Music Festival, and Associate Conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society.

Ian won a scholarship at age 14 to the Junior School of the Royal Academy of Music in London, later winning all the prizes for organ performance. He completed his studies with Flor Peeters in Belgium.

Ian has appeared with most major UK orchestras and also the Polish and Stuttgart Chamber Orchestras, Bremen Philharmonic, Rhein-Main Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Komische Oper Berlin, and Darmstadt State Opera among numerous others. He is featured on many film soundtracks including Amadeus, Polanski’s Death and the Maiden, Restoration, Cry the Beloved Country, Voices from A Locked Room, and the BBC‘s production of David Copperfield.

John McKean is a harpsichordist and musicologist based in Boston, where he serves on the faculty and is chair of the Historical Performance Department at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. Frequently in demand as both a soloist and continuo player, he has performed extensively throughout Europe and North America, with concert engagements bringing him to venues as far afield as the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Fondazione Cini (Venice), Museu da Música (Lisbon), St. Martin-in-the-Fields (London), Norðurljós Hall (Reykjavík, Iceland), and the Philips Collection (Washington, DC). Critically acclaimed for his “intelligent” and “precise” playing (The Washington Post) as well as his “sonorous brilliance and thrilling, dance-like energy” (Allgäuer Zeitung), John performs with leading American and European ensembles, including Apollo’s Fire, Emmanuel Music, the Catacoustic Consort, Camerata Vocale Freiburg, Habsburger Camerata, and has appeared with the Jacksonville, Naples, Portland (Maine), and Pittsburg symphony orchestras (among others). He counts among his live radio broadcasts performances on NPR, BBC Radio 3, and Deutschlandradio Berlin.

John holds degrees in German Studies and Harpsichord Performance from Oberlin College/Conservatory and an advanced performance diploma from the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg (Germany), where he studied with Lisa Crawford/Webb Wiggins and Robert Hill respectively. He received additional instruction over the years from some of the greatest modern masters of historical keyboards, including Arthur Haas, Jacques Ogg, Skip Sempé, Jesper Christensen, Ketil Haugsand, Mitzi Meyerson, Richard Egarr, and Gustav Leonhardt. He also holds an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of Cambridge (U.K). His master’s thesis unearthed new details concerning the life and works of French harpsichord composer Gaspard Le Roux, while his doctoral dissertation examined the development of keyboard technique during the German Baroque. For several years he served as an assistant editor of the Oxford University Press journal Early Music. Beyond his musicological work and performing career, he also maintains an active interest in instrument building (he regularly performs on a 17th-century style Flemish harpsichord of his own making), music publishing, typography, and exploring the remote corners of his home state of Maine.

The program notes provided for this performance were written by Michael Goetjen. Mr. Goetjen is a musicologist, harpsichordist, and organist whose research focuses on eighteenth-century opera and the music of Mozart. He teaches as a lecturer in music at MIT and BU. This evening’s concert features members of the Handel & Haydn Society in small scale performances of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi. In paring down the instrumentation of the strings to one musician per part, H&H demonstrates the versatility of this genre in the Baroque to be adapted for a variety of performance contexts. The soloists in each concerto will only stand out more in this stripped down instrumentation. Because of this, we can imagine these works functioning more as aristocratic entertainment than concert music in the modern sense. Indeed, the domestic nature of some of these works is most evident in the double harpsichord concertos, discussed below. Yet, H&H also shows the continuing relevance of Vivaldi’s and Bach’s contributions to this genre with a recent work by a living composer, Caroline Shaw, whose Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings provides a fresh take on the Baroque style of these composers.

In opening the program, Vivaldi’s Sinfonia in G Major, RV 149 will fulfill its intended function as introductory piece. Composed in 1740, this work for strings and continuo originated as part of the festivities surrounding the visit of the Crown Prince of Saxony and Poland, Friedrich Christian, to the Ospedale della Pietà, the orphanage and school for girls in Venice where Vivaldi spent decades teaching and composing. During the prince’s visit on March 21st, Vivaldi supervised the performance—most likely by girls from the school—of three concertos (RV 540, 552, 558) and this sinfonia, all of which he composed for the occasion. While the concertos could stand alone, Vivaldi’s Sinfonia served as introduction to a vocal work, a cantata by Gennaro d’Alessandro, who had replaced Vivaldi as maestro di coro at the Pietà in 1739. D’Alessandro’s cantata, titled Il coro delle muse (“The chorus of the muses”) has given Vivaldi’s associated Sinfonia its nickname. Musically, Vivaldi’s Sinfonia is fairly typical in the faster outer movements, but the exceptional slow movement is noteworthy in its division of the strings into arco and pizzicato. This creates an unusual texture where the same parts are simultaneously heard plucked and bowed by different players. 

Out of his more than 500 concertos, Vivaldi’s compositions for solo cello in that genre are quite common; the only instruments with more solo concertos in his output are violin and bassoon. So, in some ways, the Cello Concerto in D Minor, RV 407 is just one of many, but as a representative of his writing for the solo cello, it is particularly appealing. While there is no specific information about its origin or intended performance, this piece is more striking in its musical features than interesting for its historical context, in particular the second movement. This section is cast in typical Vivaldi fashion as a Sarabande—a slow Baroque dance in a triple meter—with a continuously repeated ground bass played in octaves by the orchestra. The solo cello then has a quite lyrical but very ornate melody over top of this sparse texture. What is striking about this is not the evocation of dance or use of a repeated ground bass, but rather the allusion to opera—a genre in which Vivaldi also composed. The descending ground bass—in this case moving chromatically by half step in a minor key—combined with the vocality of the cello’s part suggests an operatic lament. Indeed, the particular ground bass here is quite similar to the well known “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas—in the same key of G Minor no less. While there is no evidence for a direct connection between this concerto and that opera, the use of a common operatic convention of a lament bass is clear. In fact, many eighteenth century commentators likened instrumental concertos to opera arias (and vice versa). 

In addition to a multitude of solo concertos, Vivaldi also composed concertos for orchestra without soloists, where the orchestra as an ensemble is featured as opposed to singling out particular constituents. An excellent example is his Concerto for Strings in G Major, RV 151, often called the Concerto alla rustica. Composed in the late 1720s, around the same time as his beloved Four Seasons concertos, the Concerto alla rustica may have been intended for the court of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome, where the Arcadian movement favored depictions of pastoral and rustic imagery in art and music. This possibility is supported by the inclusion of oboes in two movements—although this work can be performed without them—instruments often associated with the pastoral in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the third movement of the concerto features hints of folk music by using the Lydian mode, a similar technique used by Telemann in his Polish style instrumental music. 

During his nearly three decades working as director of church music in Leipzig, JS Bach also participated in many secular music-making activities in that city. In 1729, he assumed the directorship of the Collegium Musicum, an ensemble founded by a young Telemann in 1702 during his time as a university student at Leipzig University. The Collegium gave weekly performances, often at the Zimmermannsches Kaffeehaus, also known as Café Zimmermann. This popular meeting place for socializing and concertizing saw performances of many of Bach’s secular cantatas—including the famous Coffee Cantata BWV 211—as well as instrumental music including orchestral suites and concertos. Having gained this position, Bach found an impetus for composing his concertos for harpsichord. The solo harpsichord concertos likely would have featured Bach himself as soloist at Zimmerman’s. But, the concertos for two or more harpsichords probably have a somewhat different genesis. While not certain, it’s likely that they could have originated in domestic family performances in the Bach household. In the early 1730s, Bach’s sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philip Emanuel still lived with their parents, although by 1735 both had left for work or school. 

Of these, the Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in C Major, BWV 1061, actually exists in two versions, one for just two harpsichords without orchestra (sometimes referred to as BWV 1061a), in a similar vein to Bach’s Italian Concerto BWV 971 for solo harpsichord, where the harpsichord plays the role of both soloist and orchestra. In the version of BWV 1061 that includes strings, the second movement remains without orchestra and the outer movements feature only minimal parts for the strings. Rather it is the interplay of the two harpsichords, trading roles of soloist and accompaniment, that provides the interest in this piece. 

Many of Bach’s harpsichord concertos are actually arrangements of previous works. While BWV 1061 is an exception, its pair on this program, the Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in C Minor, BWV 1060, is not. While the original source has not been identified, Bach scholars posit that BWV 1060 is an arrangement of a lost double concerto for violin and oboe possibly from Bach’s time in Köthen (1717- 1723). There exist multiple modern reconstructed versions of this lost precursor, sometimes identified as BWV 1060R, which itself has become a frequently performed work. This practice of self-borrowing and arrangement was quite common among eighteenth century composers like Bach; although Handel is perhaps the more notorious self-borrower. While such a practice of reusing or recycling sections of music or even whole works might be seen today as a result of mere expediency or lack of effort, a closer examination of the borrowings of Bach and Handel among others shows that they did not merely reuse but rather expressively reinterpreted the preexisting material. In doing so, the newer version of each borrowing presents itself as a different work of art on its own. Despite aural similarities, these connections can delight us when we recognize them in a new context rather than disappoint us for expecting something entirely new. 

Nestled among these well-loved works is a much more recent composition, Caroline Shaw’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings. It was commissioned by A Sound Salon, an early music group formerly known as Byron Schenkman & Friends, with harpsichordist Byron Schenkman as the soloist. A Sound Salon premiered the work in 2023 during their 10th anniversary concert. The youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Shaw’s work has been quite diverse in style but this is not her first foray into using Baroque forms and conventions in new ways. The piece that won her the Pulitzer in 2013 was her Partita for 8 Voices, an a cappella work that features a mélange of different vocal styles and techniques but is organized like a Baroque suite. In addition, her 2015 multimedia composition Ritornello brings together a string orchestra and vocal ensemble as well as a film component. The title references the Baroque form most common in concertos, where a section of music for orchestra returns throughout the movement in alternation with the solo sections. While she takes the idea of return from ritornello form, the rest of the work is not stylistically very Baroque. Her Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings hews perhaps more closely to a Baroque musical language but still finds room to surprise or even perplex us. In an interview with The Nation, Shaw said of this piece: “It sounds like if Jane Austen took mushrooms and had a little tryst.” She also told The Seattle Times that she used the “familiar grammar” of Bach but twisted it to create a surrealist, alternative reality version of a Baroque concerto.

ChatJSB: Ian Watson & Chris Shepard