New York Polyphony

During the early 18th century, several fine composers became very successful musicians and went on to earn lasting fame and respect for their work. Even though they lived in different countries, and few of them ever met, they studied each other’s work and influenced each other. We’ll play for you a selection of our favorite pieces by these masters.

François Couperin, called “le Grand”, was the most important member of a great family of French composers. His Quatorzième Concert is the final work in a set of fourteen Concerts composed for the entertainment of Louis XIV, the “Sun King”. In the sequence of slow/fast/slow/fast movements, we can see the strong influence of the Italian sonata on Couperin’s music. To introduce the Quatorzième Concert, we have chosen a beautiful Prelude by Jacques Hotteterre, the most prominent in another French family of musicians.

Sylvius Leopold Weiss, from Breslau (now called Wroclaw, in Poland), was the most important lutenist of the 18th century. He spent time performing and composing music in Rome before settling in Saxony as a high-priced virtuoso at the Dresden court. The Prelude and Musette in a minor for lute solo show off the grand “Weissian” style which was very much admired by his peers.

Georg Frideric Handel enjoyed four lucrative, if itinerant, years among the states of Florence, Rome, Venice, and Naples as a composer of operatic and sacred works. Then, inspired by the resounding success of his opera Rinaldo in London (1711), he relocated to England. Though we usually think of him as a keyboardist, Handel, since childhood, delighted in playing the oboe. The Sonata for flute in G major, published first in about 1727, is Handel’s own reorchestration of an oboe sonata (in F) written during his early days in London more than a decade earlier.

Georg Philipp Telemann settled in Hamburg in 1721 remaining there for the rest of his long life. As the appointed head of music for the city, he was director and composer for the five main churches, the opera, and the Latin school. In addition to these jobs, he published much of his own chamber music, engraving the plates himself, and selling it to the citizens of Hamburg for their enjoyment. Fantasia 10 in E major for unaccompanied bass viola da gamba comes from Telemann’s set of twelve Fantaisies pour la basse de violle (Hamburg 1735), recently rediscovered in a German palace near Hannover.

Antonio Vivaldi, director of music at the Pietà in Venice, wrote for the lute on several occasions. The most famous of his lute works is the Concerto in D major, for which the original orchestration is lute, two violins and bass. Since one violin always doubles the lute in the orchestral sections, the basic texture of the music is that of a trio sonata (two treble instruments and one bass). For our performance, we use the popular 18th-century combination of flute, lute, and bass viol to cover the basic score.

We conclude with music of Johann Sebastian Bach who, as we know, was quite familiar with music of each of the other composers on today’s program. In 1724, the most renowned flutist of his era, Pierre Buffardin, visited with the Bach family in Leipzig. Within a matter of a few months, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a prodigious number of exquisite virtuosic works for transverse flute. This output includes no fewer than eight cantata obbligatos and, most likely, the E Minor Sonata for flute and basso continuo that we hear today. Clearly Bach was inspired by Buffardin, but did those two venerable musicians participate, together, in the premiere performances of these masterworks? Imagine!

Olav Chris Henriksen and Peter H. Bloom