The first faculty concert on Friday, June 23, at 8 p.m. in Kulas Recital Hall, will be one of two rare opportunities for audiences to hear BPI’s world-class faculty members perform together. In keeping with BPI's thematic title, the chamber music program will include Italian-influenced music from Poland, England, Germany, and France. The concert will open with a four-part Canzona by the early-17th-century Polish composer Marcin Mileczewski, whose work was modeled on sonatas by Marini, Farina, and Castello. Viola da gamba players Catharina Meints and BPI Artistic Director Kenneth Slowik will offer an unaccompanied duo sonata by Johannes Schenck, and oboist Gonzalo Ruiz and violinist Marilyn McDonald pair up for one of Georg Friderick Handel’s trio sonatas. The Italian sonata influence is also heard in the prefatory Sonade (as the French transliterated it) to François Couperin’s La Piémontoise. Recorder player Michael Lynn is the soloist for a chamber concerto by the Englishman Roberto Valentino, who, as his adopted name suggests, spent much of his creative life in Italy. Two secular cantatas with Italian texts by Johann Sebastian Bach will round out the program: Amore traditore, BWV 203, featuring distinguished Dutch baritone Max van Egmond and harpsichordist Webb Wiggins, and Non sa che sia dolore, BWV 209, featuring flutist Christopher Krueger and soprano Penelope Jensen.
The second faculty concert, on Friday, June 30, at 8 p.m. in Warner Concert Hall, will open with with two concerti grossi in the Italian style by two non-Italians, Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer and Pieter Hellendaal. Gonzalo Ruiz will bring the first half of the concert to a virtuosic close with a reconstructed oboe concerto by J.S. Bach.
The second half of the program will present a semi-staged version of the Terpsicore Prologue to the 1734 revival of Handel’s Il Pastor Fido. The BPI orchestra will be joined by soloists soprano Kendra Colton, singing the role of Erato, the Muse of music, and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Lane, singing the role of Apollo. The performance features members of the New York Baroque Dance Company, whose artistic director, Catherine Turocy, will choreograph the production.
Monday through Thursday of the weeks of June 18 and June 25, BPI faculty members will present free lectures and/or “faculty fringe” recitals, beginning at 1:30 p.m. in Kulas Recital Hall. Of special interest will be a discussion on Tuesday, June 20, which will pay tribute to BPI’s founder, oboist and viola da gamba player James B. Caldwell, who died earlier this year. Caldwell was Professor of Oboe at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music since 1971.
BPI student participants will showcase their work in free recitals Saturday, June 24, and Saturday, July 1, in Kulas Recital Hall. Both recitals begin at 2 p.m. |
