SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Music of the French Baroque: Juilliard415 (Orchestra of the Juilliard Historical Performance program), William Christie (conductor), Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater, New York, 3.12.2010 (SSM)

Jean-Baptiste Lully - Overture from Atys

Marc-Antoine Charpentier - Concert pour quartre parties de violes (H. 545) (selections)

Georg Muffat - Florilegium Secundum, Fasciculus II, Laeta Poesis

Marc-Antoine Charpentier - Noëls sur les instruments (H. 534)

Jean-Philippe Rameau - Overture from Naïs

Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville - Sonata Secunda

Jean-Philippe Rameau - Pièces de clavecin en concert, IIIe Concert

Jean-Philippe Rameau - Suite from Les Paladins

Encores:

Marc-Antoine Charpentier  - In Nativitatem  (H. 416), La Nuit
Jean-Philippe Rameau –   Les Indes Galantes , Les Fleurs- Quatuor pour orchestre seul

Although tonight's program can't really be entitled “Christie's Greatest French Baroque Hits,” this concert epitomized the music on which William Christie has built his career. Mr. Christie may not have been the first conductor to promulgate the work of the French Baroque (Jean-Claude Malgoire founded his Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy in 1966); but amazingly the American (now French) citizen from Buffalo somehow broke through the closed French musical hierarchy to become the leader for the past thirty or so years of the Baroque revival in France. The Juilliard School should be honored to have him back again as a guest artist and teacher. His association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starting with his cutting-edge (if such a term can be used with music written in 1676) full-dress production in 1989 of Lully's Atys, led the way for later revivals of Baroque opera. The performers and conductors who have passed through Christie's Les Arts Florissants is a list of prominent names in early music performance: Marc Minkowski, Christophe Rousset, Hugo Reyne, Hervé Niquet and Julliard's faculty member Kenneth Weiss. One would expect several more names to be added to this list from the students performing here.

Mr. Christie presented the results of his training of the first- and second-year instrumentalists in Julliard's Historical Performance program. With about the same number of instrumentalists as in his own Les Arts Florissants, the orchestra was large enough to perform a variety of works by composers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The group began with the brief overture to Lully's Atys and then continued with music by one of the mainstays of Mr. Christie's repertory, Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Charpentier has been doubly lucky. First he found a patroness for whom he acted as personal composer, and he thus managed to escape Lully's tyrannical domination of the contemporary music scene. But he was forgotten until Christie's large discography of Charpentier's music brought him back to life. In a search engine look-up of “Charpentier”  his name would never, before Christie's recordings, have appeared as it does now as “Marc-Antoine Charpentier” ahead of his namesake “Gustav Charpentier,” the composer of the opera Louise.

The Charpentier selection consisted of one of the very few purely instrumental pieces he wrote, the Concert pour quatre parties de violes. This short collection of dances is clearly a favorite of Christie's: he has recorded it several times. It is in fact a paradigm of the standard Baroque dance suite best known today in the collection of Bach's keyboard suites. It begins with a canon-like prelude and continues with an Allemande that could have been written by Charpentier's contemporary, the famous master of the viol and recluse St. Colombe, on one of his better days. The Sarabande with its echoes of the popular La Folie theme was followed by two lively gigues, one English and one French, a distinction that perhaps was better understood by composers of the time. A Passacaille, a common musical form that often ends Baroque compositions, completed the suite.

Georg Muffat, a curious figure in the history of music, was officially French, but thought of himself as German, even though his parents were Scottish and he grew up in Alsace. Based on the suite performed tonight, one must consider him  “French by music,” the same phrase that can be applied to his mentor, the Italian-born Lully. This suite is pure Lully, from the opening dotted rhythmic overture through the programmatically-named pieces whose titles in fact rarely have anything to do with the music being played. There is nothing of the poet in the beginning overture or of the Jeunes espagnols in the second movement, and they could be substituted for any other movement in the dance suite. This disconnect between the title of the piece and the music it was meant to describe reached its ultimate absurdity several years later in François Couperin's “Pieces de Clavecin” with titles like Les culbutes Ixcxbxnxs or, even better, Les fastes de la grande et ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx.

After some brief Charpentier Noëls and an intermission, Mr. Christie moved his orchestra into the eighteenth century with music by Rameau and Mondonville. Rameau has required less resuscitation in recent years than Charpentier; Rameau's keyboard music was performed back in the 1930s and 1940s by Wanda Landowska and in the 1950s by Marcelle Meyers. Mr. Christie's contribution to the Rameau revival came in the form of full-blown productions of Rameau's operas in Europe and here in NYC at BAM.

The music played in the first half of the concert is unquestionably an acquired taste. It may have been a relief for the audience to grab on to Rameau's infectious rhythms and more modern orchestral colors in the second half, but many were unfamiliar with the music and unsure of the protocol of applauding. The program notes should really have indicated that traditionally the so-called double of a French suite is played without pause as was the case here with the Deuxième Tambourin of the Pièce de clavecin en concert. The same was true of the performance of the last piece, the suite from Rameaus' opera Les Paladins. The two minuet movements were combined and most of the audience was waiting for the final Contredanse before applauding, but it had in fact just been played. Even more confusing to the audience was Mr. Christie's switch from the small chamber group that performed the first two movements of the Pièce de clavecin en concert to a full orchestra playing Rameau's own transcription of the Tambourin taken from his opera Dardanus. Mr. Christie had to notify the audience by a nod of his head that the piece had indeed ended.

I leave the best for last: a foot-stomping, head-bobbing (not from the well-mannered audience, but from Mr. Christie sitting on the side) performance of the little-known composer Mondonville's Sonata Secunda. The work, part of a set of six, was played in one of its many versions, this one for two violins, viola da gamba, bassoon and oboe. The star here was the oboist Priscilla Smith, who played the highly virtuosic score with tremendous skill and confidence.

It should be noted that the instruments played here are original or contemporary reconstructions of period instruments. The horn and trumpet players in particular are to be commended for the successful mastery of their extremely difficult valveless instruments. The sounds that these instruments produce come from "lipping," varying the pressure and tension on the mouthpiece. Think of playing the piano without keys and you'll get an idea of the difficulties involved!   

The enthusiastic audience called the players back with ovations that were forceful enough to warrant two encores. The final piece, a brief Chaconne, was a fitting ending in true French Baroque fashion to a delightful concert.

Stan Metzger