Concerts celebrate work of female composers
What: Victoria Mendelssohn Choir: Vox Femina When/where: Friday, 7:30 p.m., Chapel of the New Jerusalem (Christ Church Cathedral); Sunday, 3 p.m., SHOAL Centre (10030 Resthaven Dr., Sidney) Tickets: $20. In person at Russell Books, Ivy’s Bookshop and Tanner’s Books What: Luchkow-Jarvis Duo: Handel’s London When/where: Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Chapel of the New Jerusalem (Christ Church Cathedral) Tickets: $25, seniors and students $20. In person at Munro’s Books, Ivy’s Bookshop, Long & McQuade and the cathedral office
The Victoria Mendelssohn Choir, founded and conducted by Simon Leung, made its debut in 2014, and has about two dozen members. This weekend, it will return in an intriguing pair of concerts celebrating noteworthy female composers. Spanning five centuries, the program features rarely performed sacred and secular choral works and vocal and instrumental solos.
Of the five women represented, two count as reasonably well known, though largely because of their connection to more famous men: Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn). Both were accomplished musicians, though considerations both personal and social prevented their becoming major professional composers.
Clara Schumann, despite immense promise as a composer, subordinated her creative work to her pianistic career and to supporting her husband, Robert, and largely abandoned composition after his death. Hensel, too, was a fine pianist and a very gifted composer, though family and social pressures largely kept her from pursuing her calling publicly.
From Clara Schumann’s relatively small body of work (mostly piano and vocal works), pianist Michael Gaudet will play a solo piece and the choir will perform Three Mixed Choruses, from 1848.
The whole second half of the program will be devoted to the much more prolific Hensel, including selections from her Gartenlieder, a set of six choral songs about nature published in 1847, the year of her death at age 41. Gaudet will perform one of her published piano pieces, tenor Jeremy Notheisz will perform two of her many songs, and the concert will culminate in her choral paean to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, from 1833.
The program opens with a selection from a “garland of madrigals” by an Italian nun, Vittoria Aleotti, published in 1593; a sacred piece by a French composer, Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937); and A Canadian Boat Song, a soprano-baritone duet from Songs of the Sea (1890), an early work by the very prolific, highly regarded American composer Amy Beach.
The period-instrument duo comprising violinist Paul Luchkow and keyboardist Michael Jarvis is in its third season of chamber-music concerts in the upstairs chapel at Christ Church Cathedral.
Their concert on Saturday will offer a snapshot of the cosmopolitan musical world in which Handel found himself when he arrived in London in 1712, one comprising English performers and composers but also many French, Italian and German musicians, working in styles both old-fashioned and modern.
The program, which spans half a century, includes two sonatas by Handel, one of them his last piece of chamber music, and opens with one of the Op. 5 sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli. Corelli exercised an immense influence on Handel, and they worked together during the young Handel’s time in Rome.
The rest of the program comprises sonatas and solo harpsichord pieces from less familiar performer-composers in Handel’s London, mostly natives — William Babell, William Croft, Maurice Greene — but also a transplanted Italian, Geminiani.
Babell was the harpsichordist in some of Handel’s early operas in London, and achieved international fame with his virtuoso arrangements of popular opera arias and overtures. Croft and Greene were noteworthy competitors of Handel’s. Greene was also for a time on intimate terms with Handel, though they eventually had a falling-out such that, a contemporary reported, “for many years of his life, [Handel] never spoke of [Greene] without some injurious epithet.” Geminiani was considered by his English contemporaries as Handel’s equal as a composer.
Among the harpsichord solos on the program is a four-movement suite by Greene, apparently influenced by Scarlatti and by Bach’s sons, and Babell’s arrangement of one of Handel’s most famous arias, Lascia ch’io pianga.