THE NEWTOWN BEE, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2011
Concert Review
Music Fit For A King:
The Aulos Ensemble’s Return To Newtown
By Wendy Wipprecht
The Aulos Ensemble returned to Newtown after an absence of several years to perform a program entitled “Music at Versailles: A Royal Entertainment” at Edmond Town Hall on Sunday, November 6. This was the last in the fall concerts put on by Newtown Friends of Music; the spring concerts will begin after the holidays, on Sunday, February 12.
Those who were fortunate enough to attend the candlelight concert the Aulos Ensemble gave at Newtown House during the town’s tercentennial celebration in 2005 will recall with delight their performance of Colonial-era European and American music played on period instruments.
There is a certain ironic pleasure to be derived from hearing music composed for performance at Versailles, the seat of the absolute French monarchy, in a New England town hall, the symbol of American local democracy. Other circumstances, however, have recently brought the 18th Century forcibly to mind for many Connecticut residents.
Power outages sent many of us back to Colonial times, when heat, light, water, food, and basic hygiene were not to be had save by endless toil. Only kings and the nobility led different lives, and proclaimed their exemption from labor by gorgeous display and elaborate etiquette. The more ornate and ritualized everyday life at court was, the more it proclaimed the power of the monarch. Hence the highest noblemen competed for the honor of dressing the king.
The French court embodied conspicuous consumption: Louis XIV’s suppers began at ten o’clock, contained twenty separate dishes, and went on for hours, brilliantly lighted by hundreds of candles and accompanied by music composed for the occasion. (On the other hand, food traveled so far from the royal kitchens to the royal table, and in such a stately manner, that Louis may never have enjoyed a hot meal.)
The music of the royal court was also ornate, elegant, and formal, but because Louis XIV himself and several of the upper nobility were also music lovers, the court attracted the best musicians of the day. While 20th Century audiences might balk at sitting through the allegorical, mythology-based opera-ballets of Rameau, they have no difficulty appreciating the suites excerpted from those longer works. To hear this music performed on period instruments is a special treat. In a way, the audience is hearing something very like the music heard at Versailles about 300 years ago, during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV.
The Aulos Ensemble, formed by five Juilliard graduates in 1973 and named for an ancient Greek wind instrument, was at the forefront of the original instrument movement. Its members are Christopher Krueger (flauto traverso), Marc Schachman (baroque oboe), Linda Quan (baroque violin), Myron Lutzke (baroque violoncello), and Arthur Haas (harpsichord).
The recent concert in Newtown began and ended with suites from the opera-ballets of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), one of several great French composers of the 18th Century. The five pieces from the Suite from Les fêtes d'Hébé, an allegory about the arts of music, poetry, and dance, demonstrated musical variety and drama that were surprising. There were minuets that sounded almost like processionals; a “graceful air for Zephyr and the Graces” that set the wind instruments against the strings in the most elegant dance partnership imaginable; a “tender air” with the melody in the oboe that was especially beautiful; and an “air for the Spirit of Mars” that seemed to go straight into the last piece, “Victory,” in which flute and oboe took on the voices of baroque trumpets with military pomp, gleeful energy, and flair.
Another great 18th Century French musician, Francois Couperin (1668-1733), came from a famous musical family. Couperin is best known today for his harpsichord music, which has influenced musi-cians as diverse as Richard Strauss, Ravel, Bach, and Brahms; in his own time, Couperin’s fame rested on his harpsichord music, his theoretical work on harpsichord performance, and his royal appointments as the king’s organist and as the director of chamber music, positions he held under both Louis XIV and Louis XV. His contribution was the rococo style, a highly refined, aristocratic type of music that valued intimacy of scale and sweetness of expression over baroque grandeur and heroics.
The Aulos Ensemble played the Troisième Concert royal, or third royal concert. All sections have the names of dances as their titles, but they are intended for listening rather than dancing. After an elegant and flowing Prelude for all instruments except the flute, the sprightly Allemande gives the flute the melody, with accompaniment from the cello and harpsichord. The Courante gives its melody to the oboe; the Sarabande grave, a stately section, begins with a flute solo and ends with a violin solo; the Gavotte gives the melody to the flute and then the oboe, with accompaniment from the cello and harpsichord; and the Musette belongs to the harpsichord, droning at the beginning of the piece, underpinning the violin solo, the violin and flute duet, and the oboe solo, and finally returning to prominence as a solo instrument. The Chaconne provides a lively ending to the suite, in which each instrument has its moment in the sun as the theme is passed around with amazing dexterity.
The Aulos Ensemble writes its own transcriptions and arrangements, but they are probably being true to Couperin’s intent by providing so much instrumental variation in so small a space.
The first half of the program ended with three short pieces originally written for harpsichord by the lesser-known composer Claude-Benigne Balbastre (1724-1799). Balbastre, who studied with Rameau’s brother in Dijon, eventually came to Paris and became famous as a harpsichord and organ virtuoso. The Aulos Ensemble played transcriptions of three short works originally written for harpsichord: the pastoral and tuneful La Castelmore,in which the oboe plays a pastoral melody over the harpsichord and droning cello, and then the violin and cello compete for prominence in a graceful rondeau; La Morisseau, a stately hymn of praise that features a beautiful melody cunningly ornamented in the French style; and La Malesherbe, which begins with a pretty and refined oboe melody and then moves into a speedy, rollicking dance for the violin. It was a delightful introduction, one that left me wanting to know and hear more.
The second half of the concert was devoted to Rameau’s first opera-ballet, in the Suite from Les Indes Galantes , or “The Indies in Love.” The plot is a heady mix of love and exotic locales — Turkey, Peru, Persia, and North America — and several allegories. (The fourth section, “Les Sauvages,” about North America, was added when the opera was published in the form of “quatre grands concerts.”)
The Aulos Ensemble performed 13 parts of the Suite. A few of the titles should suggest their range: Minuets, including one for warriors; airs for the Rose, for the North Wind and the West Wind, for flag-carrying warriors, for the Incas of Peru, and for African slaves; a prelude for the adoration of the sun; a piece called, simply, “The Savages” (or the wild men), and two fast concluding dances, a Chaconne and “Tambourins.”
This was a concert full of surprises and delights. The surprises centered, at least for this reviewer, on how much can be contained within the formal boundaries of this music, which is generally seen as at a remove from ordinary life and emotion. What conveyed this new information to me was doubtless the excellence and delicacy of the Aulos Ensemble’s playing.
To the members of this group, the music of the French court is as vital as any other, and they know it from the inside out: they not only perform this repertoire, they are also its transcribers, and thus, in a way, are re-creating it twice over. Then there is the delight of listening to five people playing superbly, individually and together.
To say this concert was breathtaking would be factually true, but it would be more true to its spirit to say that a petal fell from a rose and raised a storm halfway around the world.