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Masters old and new
A weekend’s walk through history
BY DAVID WEININGER

One of the consistently amazing things about music in Boston is the way it combines breadth and depth. Take a random slice of our musical life and you’ll notice that it not only makes wide swaths through the repertoire but also extends to both the monuments and the odd, dusty corners. Treat yourself to a weekend of concerts and you can learn a thing or two about music history.

Start with the viol consort Fretwork, whose members know a thing or two about bouncing between old and new. It’s one of a growing number of groups — the Hilliard Ensemble and Trio Mediæval are two others — that record and perform both early and contemporary music, with a repertoire that runs from Orlando Gibbons to George Benjamin. Its newest recording, Im Maien ("In May"), on Harmonia Mundi, is devoted to songs and instrumental music by Ludwig Senfl, a late-15th-century Swiss-German composer who was influenced by the early Renaissance masters Heinrich Isaac and Josquin des Prés. Senfl’s songs, sung here by tenor Charles Daniels, are restrained settings of simple melodies against the smooth counterpoint of the viols. His primary aim is textual clarity, and there’s almost no ornamentation in the vocal line; that makes Daniels’s plain, almost prosaic voice an asset. What’s more notable is the ensemble: with four to six viols, the voices must be perfectly balanced, and here Fretwork excels.

At next Saturday’s concert in Harvard’s Paine Hall, the group will stick to the English — Byrd and Dowland, among others. The consort music will be balanced by vocal numbers from the wonderful soprano Emma Kirkby. That’s October 16 at 8 p.m., and tickets are $21 to $59; call (617) 424-7232.

Another outfit we usually associate with older music is our own Handel and Haydn Society. Yet it too has recently ventured into more recent fare: over the summer the H&H Chorus released a resplendent album titled Peace (Avie), with a cappella music ranging from Tomás Luis de Victoria to Schoenberg to Górecki. Next week, it’ll perform Mozart’s Mass in C minor (K.427), which in its day was itself something of a union of old and new, representing the first large-scale products of Mozart’s study of Bach and Handel. The piece was also a love letter to his new wife, Constanze, as the beautiful soprano solos attest. The program will be rounded out by Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor and Handel’s Ave Regina. H&H music director Grant Llewellyn conducts the chorus and orchestra, with sopranos Sally Matthews and Amanda Forsythe, tenor Richard Clement, and baritone David Kravitz, in concerts October 15 at 8 p.m. and October 17 at 3 p.m., both at Symphony Hall. Tickets are $26 to $60; call (617) 266-3605.

More recent and less familiar are the light operas of Jacques Offenbach. Opera Boston opens its season with two English-language performances of La vie parisienne, a rarely revived operetta that’s Offenbach’s salute to the glitzy world of the Moulin Rouge. Don’t expect Nicole Kidman, but you will find such long-familiar vocal heavyweights as tenor Frank Kelley and baritone Robert Honeysucker in the cast, and Gil Rose conducts. That’s October 15 at 7:30 p.m. and October 17 at 3 p.m. at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, and tickets are $30 to $90; call (800) 233-3123.

Gustav Mahler was known to conduct some Offenbach, and Ben Zander’s been known to conduct some Mahler. A whole season of it last time around. But anyone who didn’t get enough needn’t fret, since he’s opening the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra’s new season with more: the Adagio of the unfinished Tenth Symphony and the song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, one of the master’s innermost works, with tenor Thomas Young and mezzo-soprano Gigi Mitchell-Velasco. Concerts are October 14 at 7:30 p.m. and October 17 at 3 p.m. at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre and October 16 at 8 p.m. at NEC’s Jordan Hall. Tickets are $15 to $69; call (617) 236-0999.

We arrive, finally, at the present with MacArthur Fellow Osvaldo Golijov. Veronica Jochum, who’s on the piano faculty at New England Conservatory, premieres his Levante, a fantasy on themes from his St. Mark Passion. Daughter of the great conductor Eugen Jochum, Veronica will also premiere Zwei Jochums, two works written for her by Tufts composer John McDonald, and play works by Bach, Brahms, and Frank Martin. That’s October 17 at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, and it’s free; call (617) 585-1122.


Issue Date: October 8 - 14, 2004
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