Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra
Guest director & violin soloist, Amandine Beyer
Performances:
October 18–20, 2024 at Jeanne Lamon Hall, Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre
Program
Michel Richard de Lalande
1657–1726
La grande pièce royale: Simphonie pour le souper du roi
(Edition by Lionel Sawkins)
Georg Muffat
1653–1704
Fasciculus III “Gratitudo” from Florilegium primum
Ouverture – Balet – Air – Bourrée – Gigue – Gavotte – Menuet
Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
1665–1729
Sonata no. 5 for violin & continuo
Largo – Presto – Adagio – Courante – Aria
G. Muffat
Fasciculus II “Laeta Poësis” [Joyful Poetry] from Florilegium secundum
Ouverture – Les Poëtes [The Poets] – Jeunes Espagnols [Young Spaniards] – Les Cuisiniers [The cooks] – Le Hachis [The mince] – Les marmitons [The kitchen boys]
INTERMISSION
Jean-Philippe Rameau
1683–1764
Suite from Zoroastre, Acante & Céphise, and Les Fêtes d’Hébé
Ballet des démons – Gavotte tendre – Musette gracieuse en rondeau – Sarabande – Tambourin en rondeau – Air majestueux – Menuets – Tambourins – Gavottes gayes – Entrée de peuples différents – Gavottes pour les bergers – Air vif – Air tendre – Rigaudons – Chaconne – Tambourins
Amandine Beyer
Guest director & violin soloist
Amandine Beyer studied violin at the Conservatoire de Paris and Schola Cantorum Basel in the class of Chiara Banchini. She also benefited from the teaching of Christophe Coin, Hopkinson Smith, and Pedro Memelsdorff. In 2001, she won First Prize at the Antonio Vivaldi competition in Turin. Since then, Amandine Beyer has performed all over the world, as a soloist and concertmaster, but also with her own ensemble Gli Incogniti, which she founded in 2006. The ensemble approaches baroque and classical repertoire (Bach, Vivaldi, Couperin, Haydn, Mozart) in a spirit of freedom, pleasure, and sharing. At the same time, Amandine Beyer plays chamber music with partners such as Pierre Hantaï, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Andreas Staier, Giuliano Carmignola, ranging from the baroque to the romantic. In 2015, she created the Kitgut Quartet, a string quartet that exclusively plays on period instruments. Amandine Beyer’s discography, as a soloist or with Gli Incogniti, has been unanimously acclaimed by the critics and awarded the highest distinctions (Diapason d’Or, Choc de l’année, Gramophone Editor’s Choice, ffff by Télérama). A passionate mentor, Amandine Beyer has been teaching violin at the Scola Cantorum in Basel since 2010.
Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra
Violin
Amandine Beyer, Patricia Ahern, Geneviève Gilardeau, Johanna Novom, Julia Wedman, Cristina Zacharias
Viola
Patrick G. Jordan, Brandon Chui, Emily Eng, Christopher Verrette
Violoncello
Michael Unterman*, Keiran Campbell
Double Bass & Violone
Nathaniel Chase
Flute & Piccolo
Sandra Miller, Grégoire Jeay
Oboe
Marco Cera, Daniel Ramirez
Bassoon
Dominic Teresi
Theorbo & Guitar
Lucas Harris
Harpsichord
Charlotte Nediger
Access full bios for core orchestra members at tafelmusik.org/orchestra
*Cello chair generously endowed by the Horst Dantz and Don Quick Fund
Program Notes
by Charlotte Nediger
Lalande Symphonie
We open our musical sojourn in baroque France appropriately at the sumptuous court of Versailles. Activities at Louis XIV’s court regularly involved music, and from 1687 the person responsible for the king’s daily entertainments was Michel Richard de Lalande, Surintendant et Maître de Musique de la Chambre. Theking’s orchestra was on hand to provide music to accompany the king’s waking, dining, and retiring in the evenings. The suite by Lalande that opens our concert was apparently at the top of the Louis XIV’s playlist. Titled “La grande pièce royale,” it was further described as a “symphonie qui se joüent ordinairement au Souper du Roy,” (that was regularly played at the king’s supper), and as the Fantaisie ou Caprice “que le Roi demandait souvent” (that the king often requested). It is not “grande” in the sense of the music provided for grand state occasions and spectacles. On the contrary, it is a finely worked, intimate piece: music fit for a king. It invites you to pull up a seat at the table, royal or otherwise.
Jacquet de la Guerre Violin Sonata
Élisabeth Jacquet was born to a family of musicians and instrument makers, and played harpsichord and sang at the court of Louis XIV as a young girl. She left the court at age 19 to marry the organist Marin de la Guerre, establishing a successful career in Paris as a teacher and performer, and most notably as a composer. She was the first woman in France to have an opera produced at the Académie Royale, and published several volumes of both sacred and secular cantatas as well as instrumental sonatas and harpsichord works. The French lover of the arts Évrard Titon du Tillet published Le Parnasse François, a listing of celebrated poets and musicians. In the entry for Jacquet he notes that the greatest musicians and connoisseurs hastened to hear her play the harpsichord and that she had a particular talent for improvising preludes and fantasies. He goes on to state, “It can be said that never has a person of her gender demonstrated as great a talent as her for composition,” and her portrait carries the motto “I contended for the prize with the great musicians.” The violin sonata performed by Amandine Beyer this week is from a collection of six sonatas published in 1707.
Muffat Florilegium
Georg Muffat was born in the Duchy of Savoy, but the family moved north to Alsace when Georg was a boy. He was sent to Paris to study music from age ten to sixteen, during the heyday of Jean-Baptiste Lully. He returned to Alsace, with a position at the Cathedral in Strasbourg, but the threat of war took him to Bavaria, Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, and finally Passau. At one point he spent a year in Rome, where he was introduced to the works of Corelli.
Musicians today are indebted to Muffat, not only for the wealth of compositions he published, but also for the lengthy prefaces to these publications. Written in four languages (French, Latin, German, and Italian), they offer very detailed and invaluable descriptions of the styles and techniques employed by musicians in France under Lully, and in Italy under Corelli. His two volumes of Lully-style suites titled Florilegium Primum and Secundum (First and Second Garlands) are models of the French style he encountered as a youth in Paris. He recounts that these suites of dances were performed “with great applause at the illustrious court [in Passau], both for dancing and for instrumental concerts … or as chamber music or night music.” Each volume is organized into separate suites, or Fasciculi (Bouquets), with fanciful titles, each representing “a state of mind.” The preface of the second collection contains detailed instructions on how to play in French style: described by Muffat as “the most important secrets,” the aim is to steer the player to what is “most pleasing to the ear,” so that those playing and listening “can feel the impulse to dance in one’s heart and feet at the same time.”
As to the “state of mind” of the two “Bouquets” we have selected for this week, Gratitudo is obvious, but Laeta Poësis is a little more teasing. Subtitled “The Merry School of Poetry,” the poets are joined by young Spaniards, and apparently they all like to eat: the final three movements are titled “The cooks,” “The mince,” and “The kitchen boys.” Muffat clarifies in the German title that “the cooks are stirring something in their pots,” and adds a clever Latin text to the violin part of the movement titled “The poets” which compares the metre of the dance and of poetry: of a “foot,” the poet will “scan,” and the dancer will “leap.”
The opening overture of Laeta Poësis bears the Latin subtitle “Ad Pacefactionem Scenæ Symphonia”: A symphony for the scene of peacemaking. Much of Muffat’s early life was spent avoiding the wars that plagued central Europe at the time, and France and Germany were at war when he offered the first Florilegium collection. He wrote in the preface, “Far from me are weapons and the ways of weapons. Only notes, strings, and pitches occupy me; the effort of composing a sweet symphony keeps me busy. And while I bind the French with German or Italian melodies, I do not invoke war but, perhaps, a nation of hoped for harmony, perhaps, a prelude to beloved peace.”
Rameau Suite
The tremendous power and influence of Louis XIV’s maître de musique, Jean-Baptiste Lully, continued to be felt in France long after his death in 1687. The operas of Lully dominated the French stage for several generations. French audiences were thus shocked and overwhelmed when the then 50-year-old Jean-Philippe Rameau set tradition aside and boldly presented his first opera in 1733. To dare to write an opera that was more masterful than any of Lully’s, and to dare to question tradition by introducing innovations in style and structure, required both talent and audacity. Rameau, an outsider from Dijon who kept largely to himself, and one of the 18th century’s most accomplished music theorists, was in a unique position to shake up the Parisian public. He went on to compose some two dozen operas that rank among the highest achievements of French music of any period.
These operas offer a wealth of instrumental music, both for the dance and to set the scene. It is music that the Tafelmusik orchestra loves to play, and we are delighted to share a selection with you this week. The challenge of selecting movements to include in a Rameau suite is that there are so many choices, akin to a box of the finest, most varied, and most delicious chocolates. Faced with such glorious and plentiful choices, we have opted to sample delights from three operas.
Zoroastre, set in ancient Persia, is one of three Rameau operas with masonic undertones: the libretto was by Louis de Cahusac, a prominent French freemason whose works celebrate the ideals of the Enlightenment. It was first presented in 1749, the last of four tragédies en musique penned by Rameau.
Ten years earlier, Rameau composed the opéra-ballet Les Fêtes d’Hébé, subtitled Les Talens Lyriques: the three “talents” are poetry (personified by Sappho), music (personified by Tyrtaeus), and dance (personified by Eglé, a shepherdess who was a pupil of Terpsichore). It remained one of his most popular works during his lifetime, enjoying several revivals.
To our suite of Rameau delights we add a few movements from Acante et Céphise, a pastorale héroïque, written to celebrate the birth of Louis, Duke of Burgundy. It is a somewhat Disneyesque tale of the love of a shepherd and shepherdess who are threatened by a wicked genie and rescued by a good fairy. The best of the Disney movies have fantastic scores, and Rameau lifts the story with varied and imaginative music. Perhaps worth a call to Disney?
A note to the listener: it can be daunting to be faced with a long list of movements in a French suite, such as the Rameau selection this week. It is absolutely not a requirement to follow along, with the fear of getting lost mid-list. You are welcome to close your program booklets, sit back, and enjoy the ride. You may find that you’re occasionally wanting to tap your toes (Muffat would approve!). Or you may want to imagine yourself seated on a train enjoying a tasting menu of French delights as the landscape rolls by.