Piccolo violin

When I (Edith) proposed our upcoming demonstration recital to a number of luthiers earlier this spring, one maker who was interested was Francis Beaulieu of Montreal.  However, being primarily a viol maker, he told me he wouldn't have a standard violin available at BEMF—but he would have a piccolo violin.  I have never even heard live, much less played, a piccolo violin, which is a small violin tuned a minor third higher than the standard violin and known primarily for its solo role in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1.  Still, since I've wanted for a while to try my hand at the instrument, I have been eagerly anticipating the opportunity for the last two months.

This afternoon I finally got to meet Beaulieu and try out the instrument.  It was even smaller than I was expecting (body length approximately one-third less than a full-size violin), but strangely not as difficult to finger as I had feared.  (No, my first few attempts were not exactly in tune, but gradually the pitches became recognizable!)  And a comparison with the other violins I'll be playing showed that the piccolo violin should be able to hold its own alongside them—provided it can hold its own under the other performance conditions (namely, in a large church and with an organ).  The final decision will have to wait, then, until our rehearsal on Thursday evening, but I'm hopeful.

Biber week begins

Last evening we had the great pleasure of presenting our latest program, "Youth, Power, and Wisdom: Biber's Pictures of the Life of Christ," at Luther Memorial Church in Madison as a preview performance of our upcoming Fringe Concert at the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF).  The program includes six of Biber's partitas on the Mysteries of the Rosary:

     I. The Annunciation
     IV. The Presentation
     X. The Crucifixion
     XI. The Resurrection
     XII. The Ascension
     XIII. The Descent of the Holy Spirit



(Thanks to Marika Fischer Hoyt for the photos.)

In Boston, the recital will double as a demonstration recital for luthiers displaying their work at the BEMF Exhibition.  Edith has been working in advance with instruments by four of the luthiers—Warren Ellison, Gabriela Guadalajara, Timothy Johnson, and Daniel Larson—and is looking forward to meeting more makers and their instruments in the next few days!

Chappy will also be doing an instrument demonstration of sorts: his instrument in Boston will be a new continuo organ by A. David Moore of Vermont (Moore, however, is not exhibiting at BEMF).

This was our first time performing a full recital with our colleague and friend Philip Spray on violone.  What fun to play "The Ascension" at last with the proper instrument for the violone solo marked in the "Aria Tubicinum"!

We leave tomorrow for Boston and will keep you updated throughout the week.  If you'll be at BEMF, we hope to see you at our recital: Friday, June 14, at 9:00 a.m. at First Lutheran Church.

Update on February 14 performance

If you were planning to attend our February 14 Convocation recital at Wheaton College, we regret to inform you that it has been canceled.  Our thanks go to Prof. Edward Zimmerman for his help in trying to reschedule us for later this spring, but the Convocation calendar was already full.  We do, however, hope to reschedule the performance for next fall, so please stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

We wish you all a happy new year, and we hope to be able to play for you—in person—sometime soon!  In the meantime we've put up another sample recording, this one from our performance at the opening concert of the Sunday Afternoon Live from the Chazen series (at the Chazen museum on the UW-Madison campus).  We thought you might enjoy hearing our arrangement of Boccherini's Fandango for violin, harpsichord and percussion.  Thanks a million to Laura Guse, our percussionist!

Biber in Milwaukee...and beyond

On Saturday, December 8, we performed H. I. F. Biber’s “Annunciation” partita in the Advent-themed concert Rejoice! by Milwaukee’s Ensemble Musical Offering.  Our friend and colleague Phil Spray joined us on violone, which was a real treat, since there have been few opportunities for the three of us to play together.  However, we hope that will change in the near future.  Looking ahead to the Boston Early Music Festival in June 2013, if the Lord wills that the arrangements work out, we expect to collaborate with Phil once again for a pair of Fringe Concerts with the theme “Biber’s Life of Christ,” in which we will perform thirteen of the fifteen partitas on the Mysteries of the Rosary.

A welcome to the 2012–13 season

At last we are back performing in Madison!  On September 8 and 9 we will jump early into Madison’s concert season with recitals at Capitol Lakes Retirement Community and the Chazen Museum of Art (see “Upcoming Events” at right for details).  Our program is titled “Invitation to the Dance” and features a century’s worth of dance and dance-inspired music from France, Italy, and Germany.

In this post we’d like to present some notes on the program.  As always on WPR’s Sunday Afternoon Live, host Lori Skelton will present an interesting background sketch on each piece, but on a 1.5-hour show that, after all, is primarily dedicated to the music itself, there simply won’t be time to discuss many particulars!  Since we’re hard put to write just a simple, short essay for our program notes, we’ve written a rather extensive essay and uploaded a PDF here.  You can download it to read at your leisure on screen or on paper—and even bring it with you to the performance, which really should help with understanding of the program notes (whether or not the converse holds true!).  In any case, however you choose to read the essay, we hope it will provide some helpful insights into both the music and our preparation process.

A busy summer

Yes, we know it’s been a long time since we posted an update on our activities.  Over Memorial Day weekend we did, at last, finish the actual recording part of our complete Bach project.  We took great pleasure in working with the Noack organ at Christ the King Evangelical Lutheran Church in Houston and were disappointed only that we didn’t get to use a broader palette of the instrument’s colors.  (The violin can only handle so much sound!)  Since the organ was designed to emulate instruments of Gottfried Silbermann and Zacharias Hildebrandt, organ builders well known to Bach, it features a number of distinctive stops at 8-foot and 4-foot pitch, which served well for this particular recording.  The staff and parishioners of Christ the King Lutheran couldn’t have been more gracious to us.  While in Houston Chappy discovered all kinds of personal connections with Pastors Robert Moore and Karin Liebster! 

We also got to participate in the church’s Pentecost services on May 27, playing while a congregational survey was taking place.  That was a first for both of us!

We have now moved on to the editing phase of the recording project.  It looks like the finished product will occupy three discs, and we have tentatively established an order for the pieces and are in the early stages of writing liner notes.  For the sake of full disclosure, we’ll admit that although this project is designed to be comprehensive, with all of J. S. Bach’s works for violin and keyboard, we have decided against including the third extant version of the Sonata in G, BWV 1019—for reasons to be explained in the liner notes.  We are still looking for a company to take on the project and market the finished recording.  Any suggestions out there?

Our most recent efforts have been in preparation for a recital on July 17, 2012, at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Edith’s undergraduate alma mater.  For the last four Tuesdays in July, the CIM Alumni Association presents a “Lunch & Listen” recital series featuring alumni of the school.  Edith is excited not only to perform at CIM for the first time in ten years (she was class of ’02), but also to perform for the first time in the school’s critically acclaimed Mixon Hall.  Our program will include a suite of dances from Giovanni Bonaventura Viviani’s Capricci Armonici of 1678, the fourth Concert Royal by François Couperin, the Sonata in D for violin and continuo by Johann Georg Pisendel, and the Sonata in E for violin and obbligato harpsichord by J. S. Bach.  We’ll be using the school’s 1974 William Dowd French double harpsichord.  Find more information about the recital here.

But before we head to Cleveland, Chappy spends a week on the faculty of the Madison Early Music Festival, whose theme this year is music of the North American colonies and the early United States.  It’s a busy summer!

After Cleveland, we’ll post on our early fall projects.  Madison friends, take heart: we will finally be performing in town again come September!