CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Le Concert des Nations

Zankel Hall
Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Le Concert des Nations
·· Riccardo Minasi, Violin
·· Marc Hantaï, Transverse Flute
·· Philippe Pierlot, Viola da Gamba
·· Enrique Solinis, Theorbo and Guitar
·· Luca Guglielmi, Harpsichord
·· Jordi Savall, Director and Viola da Gamba

LULLY "Marche pour la Cérémonie Turque"
LULLY "Premiere Air des Espagnols"
LULLY "Second Air des Espagnols"
LULLY Rondeau
LULLY "Canaries"
LULLY "Chaconne des Scaramouches"
SAINTE-COLOMBE Concert a deux violes égales: Tombeau les regrets
CHARPENTIER "Caprice"
CHARPENTIER "La nuit"
CHARPENTIER "Marche des bergers"
SAINTE-COLOMBE LE FILS Prelude in E Minor
COUPERIN Sonata from "La françoise" (from Les nations)
MARAIS Prelude, Muzettes I & II, "La sautillante"
COUPERIN Prelude, "Gracieusement" from Deuxième concert royal
COUPERIN Muzette, "Naïvement" from Troisième concert royal
COUPERIN "Chaconne légère" from Troisième concert royal
COUPERIN "Prelude in E Minor"
COUPERIN "La Forqueray"
A. FORQUERAY "La du vaucel"
LECLAIR Sonata in G Minor, Op. 1, No. 8

Encores:
MARAIS Prelude and "Marche pour les matelots" from Alcyone
ANON. "Bourée d'avignonez"
PURCELL Prelude and A Dance of Fairies from The Fairy Queen

This concert and the Baroque Unlimited series are made possible, in part, by a grant from the E. Nakamichi Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Robert Mealy

JEAN-BAPTISTE LULLY Marche pour la cérémonie Turque, Premiere air des Espagnols, Second air des Espagnols, Rondeau, Canaries, Chaconne des scaramouches
Born November 29, 1632, in Florence; died March 22, 1687, in Paris.

Ironically, the composer that most perfectly represented French style to the French was himself an Italian (which may say something about all myths of cultural origin). Jean-Baptiste Lully was the son of a Florentine miller. His quick wit and nimble dancing talents won him a place as Italian coach and entertainer in the retinue of Louis XIV’s cousin, who happened to be passing through Florence on a grand tour. Brought back to Versailles, Lully proved to have an astonishing gift for adapting to a different culture. By luck, the new King was only a few years younger than Lully and loved to dance; soon the composer became the indispensable provider of lavish spectacles for the court’s entertainment.

One of Lully’s smartest moves early on was to associate himself with the brilliant comic talents of Molière. Of all their collaborations, the Bourgeois gentilhomme was by far the most popular, aided and abetted by Lully’s own appearance as the Grand Turk in the final scene, where poor Monsieur Jourdain (the ultimate fashion victim) is made to undergo a ridiculous initiation rite so he can become a grand mufti. The Turkish Ambassador had in fact visited the French court the year before, and Lully’s music was inspired by his retinue—so this program opens with a particularly global goûts-réunis, as Turkish music is heard through Italian ears to decorate a French farce.

The Spanish dances from the Bourgeois gentilhomme come from the conclusion of the play: everyone decides to go watch “nostre Balet,” a grand entertainment that has been prepared by one of the characters. This “Ballet des nations” is rarely done today, as it adds a good half hour to the play, but has some of Lully’s most inventive dance music, including the Airs des Espagnoles. The first is a kind of sarabande, danced by six Spaniards; the second is a proud and fiery loure, for a pair of dancers. After an elegant Rondeau and a Canarie (a quick dance, rather like a gigue, that ends the lesson of M. Jourdain’s dance master), the suite concludes with a festive Chaconne, again part of the Ballet des Nations, in which the lively characters of the commedia dell’arte take part.


JEAN DE SAINTE-COLOMBE Tombeau les regrets from Concerts a deux violes égales
Fourished 1658–87; died by 1701.

With the Sieur de Sainte-Colombe, we turn to the true French style that Lully inherited, the highly refined court arts of the previous generation. Sainte-Colombe’s music was only rediscovered in 1966, when a manuscript of his 67 concerts à deux violes égales was discovered in the library of the famed pianist Alfred Cortot. His music (and a fictionalized account of his relations with his more famous student Marin Marais) was brought to wide attention in Tous les matins du monde, a film that opened the ears of many to the glories of the viola da gamba. Sainte-Colombe’s Tombeau les regrets is exemplary for its passionate and lyrical rhetoric. This extended work does not memorialize anyone in particular but is rather a general meditation on loss. It includes vivid movements depicting the funeral bells (the carillon), the call of Charon (the boatman of the Styx), the weeping (“pleurs”) of those left behind, and finally the joys of the blessed souls in the Elysian Fields.


MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Caprice, “La Nuit,” from In nativitatem Dominum Canticum; “Marche des bergers,” from In nativitatem Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Canticum
Born 1643 in or near Paris; died February 24, 1704, in Paris.

Against the sophistication of the viola da gamba, the brashness of the Italian violin and the Italianate style was a shock to many Parisian ears; one contemporary devoted an entire treatise to a “Defense of the Viol against the Pretensions of the Violin.” Marc-Antoine Charpentier was one major composer who wholeheartedly recognized the virtues that recent Italian developments offered in composition; his works are much influenced by the highly inflected vocal declamation of Carissimi. A figure whose compositional genius has only come to light in our own time, Charpentier suffered from a career spent on the outskirts of the court, in the shadow of the power-hungry Lully. He found his own sanctuary in the Parisian salon of the Guises, a powerful French family that had at one time rivaled the Bourbons for political influence. Here Charpentier could pursue his art with the intimate musical forces of the household. Luckily for us, Charpentier immortalized his own art in a series of carefully prepared autograph cahiers, which even today serve as his published complete works. Among the many delights of these volumes is a Caprice for three violins, an Italianate trio-sonata movement (originally for two violins and cello, or “bass violin”) that may well have served as incidental music to a larger entertainment.

The two other works of Charpentier we hear tonight are both from various settings of the Christmas story. Over the course of his many years working with the Guises, he produced several works on this theme, all with some variation on the title In nativitatem Dominum Christum. In one of these, the large-scale In nativitatem Dominum Canticum, he includes a remarkable piece of mood-painting entitled “La nuit,” a depiction of the still silence before the arrival of the angels and the annunciation of the joyous birth of Christ. Charpentier lavishes his considerable harmonic resources on this tone-poem, moving through a rich and sonorous series of chords with the characteristic soft two-note slurred figure that was the hallmark of French operatic sleep-scenes or sommeils.

Charpentier’s similiarly named In nativitatem Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Canticum provides a sharply contrasting movement that illustrates the joyous progress of the shepherds to witness the Christ Child. This festive “Marche des bergers” uses the traditional rondo structure, where the opening theme returns between various contrasting couplets.


MONSIEUR DE SAINTE-COLOMBE LE FILS Prelude in E Minor
Flourished around 1710.

The famed Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe had one son, an even more enigmatic figure who seems to have spent a certain amount of time in England. In May 1713, we know that a benefit concert for Sainte-Colombe Le Fils was held in London, and his music, including the rhapsodic and melancholy Prelude in E Minor, survives in the Durham Cathedral library. French viola da gamba music found a highly receptive audience in England, where Marais’s works as well were much sought after. One is perhaps reminded of LeBlanc’s characterization of the sound of the viola da gamba in this elegant work: “like the voice of an ambassador, delicate and even a little nasal, always being highly proper.”


FRANÇOIS COUPERIN Sonata from “La françoise,” from Les nations
Born November 10, 1668, in Paris; died September 11, 1733, in Paris.

One of the great landmarks of French Baroque instrumental writing are the four magisterial ordres published as Les nations in 1726 by François Couperin. These enormous works are true goûts-réunis in several senses: musically, they combine the elegant flexibility of the French melodic line with the serene and balanced harmonic architecture of Corelli, while formally they literally unite the French suite and the Italian sonata (which Couperin, in deference to French tastes, calls a sonade) into a grand form with the neutral title of ordre.

Couperin’s four ordres are tributes to the four great Catholic powers of his time: France, Piedmont (the Kingdom of Savoy, now part of Italy), Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. These grand productions are the high point of Couperin’s late chamber music, and rival those of his contemporary and friend J. S. Bach (who may well have known them). The sonades that form the lengthy opening to each of these works are largely a product of a much earlier period in his compositional career, however. As he tells the story in his preface to Les nations,

Charmed by the sonatas of Signor Corelli, whose works I shall love as long as I live, just as I do the French works of Monsieur de Lully, I attempted to compose one myself ... Knowing the keen appetite of the French for foreign novelties above all else, I rearranged the letters of my name to form an Italian one, which I used instead. My sonatas, fortunately, won enough favor for me not to be in the least embarrassed by the subterfuge.

The sonata to “La Françoise” survives in its earlier form in a manuscript preserved by the Italophile music collector Sebastian de Brossard: there it is called “La Pucelle” or “The Maiden,” presumably a reference to Joan of Arc, but also perhaps a gesture toward the purity of this first youthful trio. Despite Couperin’s attempt to speak Italian in this work, it sounds unmistakably French to our ears today!

MARIN MARAIS Prelude, Muzette I, Muzette II, “La sautillante”
Baptized May 31, 1656, in Paris; died August 15, 1728, in Paris.

With Marin Marais, we come to the master who (according to Le Blanc) “founded and firmly established the empire of the viol.” Out of Marais’s huge output for the viola da gamba, we hear tonight four pieces from his Fourth Book, published in 1717. Marais included several different kinds of pieces in this collection; a third of it is devoted to “simple, singing works” that epitomize the style française. Tonight’s pieces are drawn from the fourth suite of this enormous anthology. The opening Prelude is in Marais’s most eloquent, rhapsodic style, while the muzettes recall the French aristocratic vogue for the miniature bagpipe of the same name, with all its pastoral, Watteau-like associations. This short extract from Marais’s Fourth Suite concludes with another portrait piece of some graceful acrobatics (“La Sautillante”), which is then elaborated in a virtuosic variation or double.

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN Prelude, “Gracieusement,” from Deuxième concert royal; Muzette, “Naïvement,” from Troisième concert royal; “Chaconne légère,” from Troisième concert royal

Couperin published his Concerts royaux in 1722, but explains in his preface that these works were heard in the salons of Versailles during Louis XIV’s declining years, in the season of 1714–15. With these works for unspecified treble instrument and continuo, Couperin found his most elegant summation of the goûts-réunis. Combining Corellian walking basses with a highly inflected, thickly ornamented treble line, Couperin creates a density of musical discourse in these works comparable to that of his colleague and friend J. S. Bach, while never losing a sense of charm or graciousness. The elegant Prelude gives way to yet another evocation of the rustic charms of the muzette, enriched with an obbligato part for the viola da gamba; this brief selection of movements ends with a “light” chaconne, written in 3/8 instead of the more usual 3/4.

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN Prelude No. 8 in E Minor, from L’Art de toucher le clavecin; “La Forqueray,” from Troisiéme livre de piéces de clavecin

Couperin spent much of his career in Paris as a harpsichord teacher, and he took his didactic work seriously.  In 1716, he published his L’Art de toucher le clavecin, whose title itself points to the subtle sense of touch that is crucial to his art of harpsichord playing.  Along with a lengthy meditation on various aspects of technique, ornamentation, practicing, and performing, Couperin includes in this guide a series of preludes to establish the key of whatever you’re about to play, and to make yourself at home on whatever harpsichord you’re playing.  Many of these are composed in a free, improvisatory style, but others (like the last prélude, in E minor) are marked mesuré, to be played in time. “For music,” as Couperin remarks, “has its prose, and its verse.”  This prélude is Couperin’s own version of a two-part invention, with an Italianate motif that is discussed at length in both treble and bass.  

This brief, beautifully wrought prélude is followed by a movement from Couperin’s third book of harpsichord pieces (the same volume also contains the Concerts royaux at the end).  A portrait of the viola da gamba virtuoso Antoine Forqueray, this allemande is marked ”Fierement, sans lenteur,” which means “proudly, but not slowly.”  The tolling octaves in the bass exploit one of the great virtues of the 18th-century French harpsichord, its sonorous low range, while the right hand develops a richly arpeggiated line.  Here Couperin achieves another kind of gouts-réunis in merging Italian passagework with the native French tradition (inherited from the lutenists) of the so-called “broken style,” where the player’s over-legato—carefully indicated with slurs and ties by Couperin—creates a lush tapestry of sound.

ANTOINE FORQUERAY La du vaucel, from Très tendrement
Born 1672 in Paris; died June 28, 1745, in Mantes.

In 1747, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, a remarkable gamba virtuoso, published his only volume of viola da gamba music, which he attributed to his father Antoine, a famed virtuoso of the previous generation. The authorship of these works is difficult to assign: most of the titles refer to the son’s contemporaries, like the financier Du Vaucel (guillotined in 1794), who may have been one of Jean-Baptiste’s patrons. That the son chose to immortalize his father’s works (in a rather more modern guise) is all the more puzzling considering their violent relations. At one point, Forqueray père (who seems to have had a violent jealousy of his son’s talents) put Jean-Baptiste into the Bicêtre prison for several years, and later had him banished from the country. Antoine’s stormy nature is borne out in many of the works included in the 1747 collection (he was said to play “like the Devil,” where Marais played “like an angel”), but another side emerges as well in works like this immensely sensitive and thoughtful portrait, full of a tender melancholy.


JEAN-MARIE LECLAIR Sonata in G Minor, Op. 1, No. 8
Born May 10, 1697, in Lyons; died October 22, 1764, in Paris.

The Mercure de France remarked on Leclair’s first book of violin sonatas that this music appeared at first to be “sheer algebra, capable of rebuffing the most courageous of musicians.” Indeed, Leclair, a brilliant violinist, does call for some tricky passagework in these sonatas, but nothing too extravagant; that would come later, after he met the extraordinary virtuoso Locatelli in 1728. Leclair was trained as a dancer and a lacemaker before he settled on violin-playing as his métier, and both disciplines can be heard in his music, which combines grace, elegance, and a keen attention to polished detail. A student of the Turin virtuoso Somis, Leclair brought together the brilliance and virtuosity of the Italian violin school with the native refinements of France, thus fulfilling Couperin’s prophecy of a true goûts-réunis.

The opening Largo of the Sonata in G Minor, Op. 1, No. 8, makes elegant work of a motif based around a scale, while the Vivace offers opportunities for the soloist to show off both dexterity and the ability to bring out the sonorous possibilities of the violin, in double-stops on the two lowest strings. After another Musette, this one in rondo form over a steady bass pedal of Gs and (briefly) Ds, the sonata closes with a Tempo gavotte, full of graceful slurred pairs of notes.


Violinist Robert Mealy frequently contributes program notes to
Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, and other musical organizations.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Le Concert des Nations
Le Concert des Nations takes its inspiration from Les nations, a work by François Couperin symbolizing the coming together of musical tastes and heralding a “European artistic space.” Le Concert des Nations, the youngest of the ensembles directed by Jordi Savall, was founded in 1989. Created during the preparation of the Canticum Beatae Virgine by Charpentier, this group arose out of the need for an ensemble of period instruments that could play the chamber and orchestral repertoire from the Baroque to the Romantic periods (1600–1850). Le Concert des Nations is the first orchestra of its kind made up chiefly (although not exclusively) of musicians from Latin countries (Spain, Latin America, Italy, Portugal, France, etc.), all of whom are outstanding performance specialists on period instruments. The impact of the ensemble’s recordings and concerts given in the major cities and music festivals over the last 17 years has established its reputation as one of the best original instrument ensembles performing today with a broad and varied repertoire that ranges from the earliest music to be composed for orchestra (L’Orchestre de Louis XIII, 1600–1650) to the masterpieces of the Romantic period, including the key Baroque and Classical composers.

Le Concert des Nations’s desire to increase audiences’ familiarity with a wide historical repertoire of exceptional quality through rigorous and, at the same time, revitalizing performances was apparent from their earliest recordings: Charpentier, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Marais, Arriaga, Beethoven, Purcell, and Dumanoir. The ensemble’s most recent productions include works by Lully, Biber, J. S. Bach, and Vivaldi, released under Jordi Savall’s exclusive, award-winning record label, Alia Vox.

The most recent recordings include Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, Jordi Savall’s Lachrimai Caravaggio (his first recorded composition), Ludi Musici, The Spirit of the Dance, Francois Couperin’s Les concert royaux and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

·· Riccardo Minasi, Violin

·· Marc Hantaï, Transverse Flute

·· Philippe Pierlot, Viola da Gamba

·· Enrique Solinis, Theorbo and Guitar

·· Luca Guglielmi, Harpsichord

·· Jordi Savall, Director and Viola da Gamba
Jordi Savall is an exceptional figure in today’s music world. For more than 30 years he has been devoted to the rediscovery of neglected musical treasures: 30 years of research, study, and interpretation, both as gambist and musical director. He has restored an essential repertoire to all those with ears to hear it. Beyond the happy few who already revered the instrument, he has created a wide audience for the viola da gamba, an instrument so refined that it takes us to the very brink of silence. Together with Montserrat Figueras, he has founded three ensembles— Hespèrion XX, La Capella Reial, and Le Concert des Nations; together they explore and create a world of beauty and emotion that reaches out to millions of music lovers worldwide and has established them as the leading exponents of so many neglected musical gems.

One of the most multifariously gifted musicians of his generation, he has built a his career as a concert performer, teacher, researcher, and creator of new projects, both musical and cultural, which makes him one of the principal architects of the current revaluation of historical music. The pivotal part he played in Alain Corneau’s film Tous les matins du monde (“All the Mornings of the World”), which won a César award for the best soundtrack; his intense concert activity (140 concerts per year); recording projects (six per year); and more recently the creation of his own record label, Alia Vox, is proof that early music does not have to be elitist or of interest to only to a minority, and that it can and indeed does appeal to an increasingly large and young audience.

Like many other musicians, Jordi Savall began his musical training at the age of six as a member of the boys’ choir of Igualada (Barcelona), the town where he was born, and later studied the cello at the Barcelona Conservatoire, from which he graduated in 1964. In 1965, he began to teach himself the viola da gamba while studying early music. In 1968 he began his specialist musical training at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, where in 1973 he succeeded his own master, August Wenzinger, and continues to give courses and master classes.

He has recorded over 160 CDs. Mr. Savall’s numerous awards and distinctions include Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1988) from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication; the Sant Jordi Cross (1990) awarded by the Generalitat (Autonomous Government) of Catalonia; Musician of the Year (1992), awarded by Le Monde de la Musique; Soloist of the Year (1993), awarded by Victoires de la Musique; the Gold Medal for Fine Arts (1998) from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Arts; Honorary Member of the Konzerthaus, Vienna (1999); Doctor honoris causa of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium (2000); Victoire de la Musique in recognition of his professional achievements (2002); the Gold Medal of the Parliament of Catalonia (2003); and the German Preise der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (2003).

Mr. Savall plays a seven-string viola da gamba by Barak Norman (London, 1697).