Aulos Ensemble

Dominique Labelle

JULY 17 AULOS ENSEMBLE - HANDEL'S AVIARY
Friday, 8:00pm ~ Spanish Courtyard
Tickets:  $25.00, $35.00   order online

Aulos Ensemble: Christopher Krueger, flauto traverso; Marc Schachman, Baroque oboe; Linda Quan, Baroque violin; Myron Lutzke, Baroque cello; Charles Sherman, harpsichord
with Dominique Labelle, soprano; Anca Nicolau, Baroque violin; Peter Kupfer, Baroque viola; Rob Nairn, violone 

Handel		Concerto in G minor for oboe and Strings, HWV 287
		Grave
		Allegro
		Sarabande
		Allegro
Handel		"Softest Sounds" from Athalia, HWV 52
Handel		"Lascia la spina" from Triumph of Time and Truth, HWV 46A
Handel		"'M'adora l'idol" from Teseo, HWV 9
Handel		Suite No. 3 in G major from Water Music, HWV 350
		(Sarabande)
		Rigaudons
		Menuets
		Country Dance
Handel		Dances for King George: excerpts from Royal Fireworks and Water Music
		Bourrée from Watermusic Suite in F
		Hornpipe from Watermusic Suite F
		Menuet from Music for the Royal Fireworks
		Chaconne from Terpsicore
Handel		Concerto a quattro in D minor for Flute, Violin, Violoncello, and Basso Continuo
		Adagio
		Allegro
		Largo
		Allegro
Handel		Aviary: "La dove gli occhi io giro" from Admeto, HWV 22
		"As when the dove" from Acis and Galatea, HWV 49a
		"Sweet Bird" from L'Allegro ed il Penseroso, HWV 55

The Aulos Ensemble, the peerless baroque band on period instruments, is joined by the phenomenal Dominique Labelle for a celebration of Handel's vocal and instrumental work. Included are a suite from the Water Music, an oboe concerto, Handel’s Aviary, a group of arias evoking nature and the trilling sounds of birds, and more.

Golden-voiced Dominique Labelle dazzled the audience  -- The Phoenix (Boston)

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ABOUT THE mUSIC
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Concerto in G minor for Oboe and Strings, HWV 287
When a composer’s dates place him three centuries away from us, the distance in time and the many difficulties that the world has passed through in that time can make it difficult both to know the human being and to prepare thoroughly-controlled account of his work. Though Handel was among the most famous and highly regarded composers wherever he lived and worked, he remains in many respects a mystery. As Christopher Hogwood has remarked, we know next-to-nothing of Handel’s politics, his religion, and his sexuality. Fortunately we do know his music, which is what makes us take an interest in the first place.
 
But even with the music, there are gaps in the record, because few in the 18th century thought about posterity, and they rarely showed much concern with keeping manuscripts in a careful order. So some pieces were published well after composition, but we lack Handel’s original manuscripts to confirm that the works are actually his. And some appeared so recently—and without documentary support—as to raise the question of their authenticity.
 
Still, even these problematic pieces can be very attractive, and they pose for us the nice little problem of comparing them with Handel’s indisputably authentic works to see if we agree with their authorship!
 
Such is the case with the well-known Oboe Concerto in G minor, HWV 287, one of his most popular instrumental works. It did not see print until 1863, and no manuscript survives in the composer’s own hand, though there is an early manuscript copy. It is generally dated 1703 to 1705, which makes it a very early work indeed, composed in Hamburg while Handel was in his teens and before he had thoroughly absorbed the zephyrs of Italy, which shaped the entire rest of his life. And already in Hamburg he seems to have decided to devote himself largely to opera—which, if successful, would guarantee the largest income—and that already meant a willingness to learn the Italian style. The pattern of the four movements—slow, fast, slow, fast—was haracteristic of the older sonata da chiesa (“church sonata”) though this had long since left the church for a life in many venues—especially when there is a vigorous, lively, and demanding solo part for a virtuoso oboist.

The extended visit that Handel made to Italy between 1706 and 1710 left its mark permanently on his music—especially the vocal music, that genre for which the Italians have always had such a predilection. Already in those early years, from the age of 21 on, Handel demonstrated that he could actually beat the Italians at their own game, in cantatas, operas, and other kinds of vocal works.
 
The essential building-block of cantata and opera was the aria, an extended vocal statement, with instrumental accompaniment, setting a text—usually quite brief—with expressive declamation and sometimes with breathtakingly florid decoration. The finest arias capture the emotional essence of the situation embodied in the text, while creating a vocal line that allows a fine singer to put his or her vocal technique on display.
 
These aria texts almost always consisted of two segments, often two compact sentences. The first sets forth the basic situation or mood; the second complements it with an idea that was subtly, or greatly, contrasting. A composer of the day recognized at once that these two sentences required different music. The first part would end with a definitive final close; then the second part would change character (in key, tempo, meter, accompaniment, or some combination of these). At the end of the second part, which was much less definitive, the composer would add the annotation, Da capo (“from the head”), directing the musicians to perform the entire first part again, sometimes omitting some part of the orchestral introduction, and bring the number to an end at the definitive cadence.  Hence these arias were called “da capo arias.”

This arrangement of sections (A-B-A) was so nearly universal that the slightest divergence from it was notable. Handel was one of the greatest masters of the time in finding ways to shape his da capo arias with variants both subtle and bold to fit his expressive purposes.
 
Since one of the main functions of the aria was to show off the singer’s voice to an appreciative audience, the repeated first section was very often marked by elaborate vocal ornamentation. In theory this was improvised by the singer, though in practice composers sometimes outlined suggested ornamentations (the few documented examples that have come down to us in writing may boggle the mind, because they often totally bury the original melody in sheer display). Of course talented singers were quite capable of working out their own ornamentations, and modern specialists in this repertory frequently do so.

To an 18th-century audience, an opera would be regarded largely as a series of opportunities to enjoy great singing in these arias, many of which became great hits. The recitatives that connected them and clarified the actual plot of the opera were largely ignored in the theater, as the fashionable members of the audience (the only ones who counted, after all!) would sit in their boxes eating and drinking, playing cards, flirting, and waiting for the next aria.
 
Genius always trumps convention, and Handel’s genius in creating brilliant, evocative, expressive, humorous, sensuous, languishing, or dramatic arias was second to none. And in moving from Italian opera to English oratorio, Handel also learned to adapt the shape of the aria to the dramatic situation,  though he retained the Da capo aria for places where musical reflection, rather than dramatic thrust, was called for.

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“Softest Sounds” from Athalia, HWV 52
Athalia is regarded by every Handel scholar as the first of the great dramatic oratorios. Handel had the immense advantage of a framework drawn from the final play by the great French classical dramatist Racine, though the English librettist, Samuel Humphreys, was unwilling to follow the original in some of its more violent elements. Athalia, a Queen of Judah, the bloodthirsty daughter of the notorious Jezebel, killed her own son’s offspring in order to clear her own path to the throne. In the end (according to II Kings 12) she died a gruesome death herself, though Humphreys weakened Racine’s denouement by simply having her sent into retirement--a grim tragic figure with a wimpy ending. Nonetheless the Athalia’s mental anguish appears in Handel’s harmonically unstable aria.

“Lascia la spina” from Triumph of Time and Truth, HWV 46a
One of Handel’s earliest large-scale works, Il trionfo del tempo e della verità, was composed in 1707 for a performance in Rome, where opera had been banned some decades earlier. Works like this were dramatic in mood, but were allowed because they were performed privately (ironically, in the homes of churchmen, like Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, who wrote the texts for this work and other evasions of ecclesiastical command). The music is expressively dramatic like the opera arias of the day, while the plot employs only symbolic personifications of the attributes Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Truth rather than human characters. But the richness of the music produced by the twenty-two year old composer made it a success in Rome and again three decades later when Handel revived it in London (in the original Italian), Finally, in the year before his death, he recast it in an English translation with still more musical additions drawn from works he had already composed. Lascia la spina is like the sarabande, a slow dance in triple meter, sung by Pleasure, who adjures us not to worry about the thorns of life.

“M’adora l’idol” from Teseo, HWV 9
In his third opera for  London (1713), Handel treated a libretto adapted from France dealing with the great classical hero Theseus. Agilea is a princess who loves Theseus but who may be expected to marry another. Her aria M’adora l’idol ends the opera’s first act. She has just been told that King Aegeus has decided to marry her, but her heart remains faithful to Theseus. For the middle section of the aria, the strings drop out leaving the oboe to duet with the singer.

Suite No. 3 in G Major from Watermusic, HWV 350
One of the best-known Handel stories—recounted by his earliest biographer, the Rev. John Mainwaring—tells how Handel had obtained leave from his employer in Hanover to go to England for a visit but has never returned. As fate would have it, the Elector of Hanover became George I of England and, so to speak, pursued his truant composer thither. Handel’s delinquency put him out of the king’s good graces. According to Mainwaring, the Water Music was first performed to serenade the king from a neighboring barge on the river Thames in 1715. The king was so taken with the music that he asked who had composed it, and upon learning that it was Handel, he promptly forgave him for his earlier negligence. Perhaps some movements of the Water Music were performed in a river outing in 1715, but there is not the slightest evidence that Handel was in need of his monarch’s forgiveness. It is clear, though, that music by Handel was played on the river two years later, when it was reported in the Daily Courant of 19 July 1717:

a City Company’s Barge was employ’d for the Musick, wherein were 50 Instruments of all sorts, who play’d...the finest Symphonies, compos’d express for this Occasion, by Mr. Hendel; which his Majesty liked so well, that he caus’d it to be plaid over three times in going and returning. 

But the work we know as the Water Music was not published in anything like its complete form until the 1730s, so, even with this description, it is very unlikely that King George heard three performances of the work we know by the title.

In fact, the title incorrectly implies that we are dealing with a single work. From the scoring and the keys we can see that there are three orchestral suites here, not one. These differ greatly in character and evident purpose. The first and longest, in the key of F, includes horns along with its woodwinds and strings and could clearly have been intended for outdoor performance. The second, in D, is the most splendid of all, owing to the festive use of trumpets. The third suite, in G, is just as clearly indoor music, with its quieter flutes and recorders. If in fact this music was performed for the King on a river outing, it is quite possible that the larger and more brilliant suites were performing going and returning, while the gentler “indoor” music accompanied dinner.

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Dances for King George: Excerpts from Royal Fireworks and Water Music
Dances of all kinds appeared in the instrumental works of the Baroque era. In addition to the forms that appeared most often in the instrumental suite—the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue—other dance types were both danced and simply listened to. The origin of the Water Music has already been described.

The Music for the Royal Fireworks was produced for a festive outdoor event, the celebration of the end to the long and grinding European war known as the “War of the Austrian Succession,” which had started in 1740 and finally ended with the signing of the peace treaty in Aix-la-Chapelle on October 18, 1748. Handel wrote for a large ensemble, largely of winds, for a fireworks display planned for April 24, 1749. The event was a disaster; fire broke out and a general panic was barely averted. But the music has retained its popularity.

Terpsichore (HWV 8b) is all but forgotten today, though it must have been a superb spectacle in 1734, when Handel wrote the music for a danced prologue, presented by a French ballet company, for a revival of his opera Il pastor fido.

Concerto a quattro in D minor for Flute, Violin, Violoncello, and Basso Continuo
This concerto is unusual for several reasons. One is the obbligato cello part, which is set free of the basso continuo to live its own expressive, virtuosic life. Another is the fact that it has no HWV number in the Handel catalogue—because its status is in doubt.  There is a manuscript (not in Handel’s hand) in the private collection of the Count of Schönborn-Wiesentheid, and it was published for  the first time in 1935 edited by Fritz Zobeley. And there is a conflicting attribution to Telemann. But whoever wrote it, the piece is certainly worth hearing. Like the oboe concerto that opened this program, the layout of movements suggests the old sonata da chiesa.

Handel’s Aviary:
All three of the arias that end the program make use of bird imagery from the text to inspire Handel’s most elaborate expression of musical similes.

“La dove gli occhi io giro” from Admeto, HWV 22

Composed in 1727 with a plot based on the story of Alceste, Handel created two great soprano roles for rival singers, and gave each of them extraordinarily brilliant music to sing. For Alceste’s act three aria, he uses the reference to birds and breezes and other natural phenomena to paint the images with an extraordinary vocal fioritura.

“As when the dove” from Acis and Galatea, HWV 49a

It was probably in 1718, while  in the service of James Brydges, soon to become the First Duke of Chandos, that Handel composed the exquisite pastoral Acis and Galatea to an English libretto by John Gay after a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The image of the love-lorn dove fills Galatea’s aria about missing an absent Acis, and this colors Handel’s musical invention.

“Sweet Bird” from L’Allegro ed il Penseroso, HWV 55

John Milton wrote poems that evoke the moods of mirth and melancholy (or at least contemplation). When Handel set these to music in 1740, he divided them into arias and choruses of alternating moods and added a third poem, devoted to moderation, by Charles Jennens. Later—wisely—he suppressed the third part so that the vivid musical setting of Milton’s poetry could stand alone. “Sweet bird” is the ne plus ultra of soprano arias evoking the song of a bird.

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ABOUT THE Artists
Aulos Ensemble
Formed in 1973 by five Juilliard graduates, the Aulos Ensemble was at the forefront of a movement that was to capture the imagination of the American listening public. In 1978 with the release of their recording, Masterpieces of the High Baroque, Aulos’ reputation for exhilarating performances informed with scholarly insight was firmly established. In those groundbreaking years, the group’s innovative programming featured a blend of flute, oboe, violin, cello, and harpsichord, later adding a viola da gamba.  With its conservatory-based training, Aulos brought an uncompromising standard of excellence in performance that resulted in invitations from virtually all of this country’s major chamber music presenters. This exposure helped create a new audience awareness for the rich rewards of this repertoire performed on ‘period instruments’ and praise from America’s most respected music critics.

In the 1980s, Aulos began two projects that brought the joy of its music-making to an ever-widening public and for the first time attracted international critical attention. The group’s first recording for the Musical Heritage Society, Original Telemann, was released in 1981 in connection with the composer’s tercentenary, and was universally hailed as one of the most accomplished and significant observances of the Telemann year, receiving the Critic’s Choice Award of High Fidelity/Musical America Magazine. Since then, the Ensemble has released over a dozen CDs on the same label, including two-CD sets of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, as well as the complete Essercizii Musici of Telemann on five CDs. This discography is unique among American period-instrument chamber groups.

Aulos’ other project in the ‘80s was the establishment of its own concert series at home in New York City. This series featured collaborations with guest artists from Europe and America who had made major reputations in this field. These collaborative concerts, exploring a highly unusual repertoire that was impossible to perform in other contexts, provided its New York audiences with cutting-edge performances as well as giving the Ensemble members vital artistic stimulation. Among the stars of the original instrument movement that appeared with the Ensemble in those years were harpsichordists Trevor Pinnock and Albert Fuller, violinists Jaap Schroeder and Stanley Ritchie, cellist Anner Bylsma, oboist Michel Piguet, and vocalists Jan de Gaetani, Bethany Beardslee, Charles Bressler, and Julianne Baird.

The 1980s also saw the beginnings of what has become a wonderful tradition for New York concertgoers—the Aulos’ Christmas concerts in front of the Neapolitan Christmas Tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These concerts have been given annually in the magical setting of the Medieval Sculpture Court and have featured a variety of guest artists. A recording of one such program, entitled A Baroque Christmas and featuring the soprano Julianne Baird, was recorded for MHS/ Musicmasters and is available to millions of people throughout the world through the Metropolitan Museum Catalogue. The popularity of these concerts and the recording encouraged Aulos to begin to offer them on tour, bringing the special affinity of this repertoire and the seasonal festivities to audiences throughout the country.  Over the past seasons the eminent American vocalists Dawn Upshaw, Sanford Sylvan, and Derek Lee Ragin are some of the artists who have appeared with Aulos in these presentations.

In the 1990s, Aulos began expanding its repertoire to include ‘one-on-a-part’ performances of some of the best-known and favorite baroque suites and concerti, including the Bach Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and the Concerto for Oboe and Violin as well as Vivaldi’s concerti The Four Seasons. These programs, referred to as “The Baroque Big Band,” are performed by eight to ten artists. An all-Bach CD, part of the continuing discography on MHS, features the Ensemble in this configuration. Additionally, Aulos began giving numerous master classes and lecture-demonstrations in 17th- and 18th-century performance practice at colleges and universities throughout the country. With its members serving on faculties of various schools of music and institutes specializing in historically informed performance, the Ensemble is responsible for training a new generation of American early music performers. Aulos concerts are frequently broadcast by National Public Radio from venues such as The Frick Collection in New York, Live at Wolf Trap, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  Most recently, its instrumental Christmas program “Joyeux Noel” was heard throughout the country repeatedly on NPR’s Performance Today.

Now, in its fourth decade, Aulos continues to explore new projects and develop outlets for its music-making.  The 2006-07 season saw its first presentation of Handel’s masque Acis and Galatea, done in a version approximating the size of the composer’s vision for the piece—five singers and eight instrumentalists without a conductor—and it was a huge hit with presenters, audiences and critics.  The Ensemble has developed a true chamber orchestra program as well, featuring Handel’s complete Water Music in performance with between 17 and 23 players.  Where appropriate, Aulos has created residencies in which the group and its guests teach and coach young professionals and then join them in these performances.  And 15 years after the release of their Christmas CD from the Metropolitan Museum, the Ensemble and Julianne Baird collaborated on In Dulci Jubilo, a recording featuring much of the new material uncovered in those many years of Christmas concerts.  This CD was released in the fall of 2006 to critical acclaim and is the beginning in a new series of recordings in affiliation with Centaur Records.  The second recording, which was released in October 2008, was Aulos’ unique version of two of Rameau’s wonderful opera suites, Les Indes Galantes and Les Fêtes d'hébé, based on suggestions of the composer in ‘short-score’ manuscripts.

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Guest Artists
Robert Nairn, Bass. A native of Australia, Robert Nairn received his Bachelor of Music with Distinction from the Canberra School of Music, and a post-graduate diploma from the Berlin Musikhochschule courtesy of a two-year DAAD German Government Scholarship. Mr. Nairn’s experience covers contemporary, jazz, traditional orchestral, and baroque and classical “authentic performance” ensembles. He has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, and the Melbourne Symphony. He has acted as guest principal bassist with the Halle Orchestra, the London Mozart players, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and held the position of principal bass with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. He holds the position of principal double bass with the Handel Haydn Society and has also performed with the English Baroque soloists, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, Washington Bach Consort, the Aulos Ensemble, Rebel, Florilegium and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Mr. Nairn is active in commissioning new works for the double bass and has premiered more than thirty compositions for both solo bass and chamber music featuring the bass. Mr. Nairn is on the faculty at The Juilliard School and Penn State University, where he also directs the University’s Baroque Ensemble. He is also president-elect of the International Society of Bassists. He has recorded for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, EMI, Virgin, ABC Classics, and Channel Classics.

Anca Nicolau, Baroque Violin.  Ms. Nicolau was born in Bucharest, Romania, where she began studying the violin at the age of four. She won her first competition at the age of nine, and at ten she was accepted as a student of George Manoliu, a former pupil of George Enescu. While still in Romania, Ms. Nicolau performed in master classes held by David Oistrakh and Yehudi Menuhin, and, at the age of fifteen, she was the winner of the Romanian National Youth Competition, and soloist with the Romanian Radio Orchestra, as well as a finalist in the George Enescu Competition. One year later, Ms. Nicolau received a scholarship to study with Ivan Galamian in New York, who was her teacher for three years. She later also studied with Raphael Bronstein and Ruggiero Ricci.  Ms. Nicolau was a member of the fellowship program and prize winner at the Tanglewood Music Festival, has toured and performed at the Spoleto, Drottningholm, Edinburgh, Sidney, Perth, Krakow, and Warsaw festivals, as well as at the Brixen Academy in Italy, and The Promenades in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Performing on both modern and period instruments, Ms. Nicolau is presently a member of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Mozartean Players, the Loma Mar Quartet, the Long Island Baroque Ensemble, and she often performs with the Smithsonian String Quartet, the Bach Ensemble, the Aulos Ensemble, the Handel and Haydn Society, and the Drottningholm Theater Ensemble. Ms. Nicolau has recorded for EMI, Nonesuch, Decca, Musical Heritage, and Sony Classical labels, and she is on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, the Hoff-Barthelson Music School, and the Westchester Conservatory. 

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