| Mar 03, 2011


Photo: Tafelmusik at St. James Major Catholic Church hall on February 18.

Tafelmusik has achieved national and international renown since they were formed 32 years ago, performing in venerable concert halls in Europe, the United States, and Asia. On February 13, 2009, they had their debut at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Two years and five days later they really hit the big time.

“We’ve performed all around the world over the past 30 years, but we’ve never played in Sharbot Lake before, and we are very happy to be here tonight,” said the orchestra’s musical director and principal violinist Jeanne Lamond at the outset of their concert at St. James Major Catholic Church in Sharbot Lake on February 18.

The large audience gave the orchestra a warm welcome, and settled in for a 75-minute concert featuring the works of two of the superstar composers of the Baroque era, J.S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, with works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Antoine Dauvergne added in for good measure.

Tafelmusik does a number of community concerts during their tours of larger centres. The Sharbot Lake concert preceded one at the Grand Theatre in Kingston on the next night, and was followed by a concert at Dominion Chalmers United Church in Ottawa, and a Family Day event at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec.

Tafelmusik arrived in Sharbot Lake early on Friday, and performed an educational concert for Sharbot Lake Public School and St. James Catholic School students in the afternoon.

Based on what Lamond and other members of the orchestra said during the two concerts, it is clear that the Tafelmusik musicians see their role as being musical time travellers from the Baroque era (roughly 1680-1750).

They love the music they play and, particularly in the free community concerts they stage, they try their hardest to bring the joy of music making to the general public.

Tafelmusik performs on restored period instruments, including stringed instruments (violin, viola, cello, and double bass) and others, including the baroque oboe, bassoon, and harpsichord, which are modern recreations of instruments from that period.

Using original instruments is anything but a gimmick for them.

“The instruments lend themselves to the Baroque repertoire,” Lamond said, “which was written with this kind of instrumentation in mind.”

Jeanne Lamond said there is a warmth to the sound of the baroque violin, for example, that comes from the use of sheep gut strings. The more modern, brighter sound of the classical violin comes from the use of metal strings and increased tension on the instrument.

As the orchestra began playing, the role of the harpsichord was one of the things that became abundantly clear.

The harpsichord looks like a piano, and like a piano, it is played by pressing down the different keys on a keyboard, with each key striking a distinctive note.

But while the piano is a percussion instrument because the keys are connected to hammers that strike the notes on taut metal strings, the keys in the Harpsichord are attached to quills that pluck the strings in the same way that a harp or a guitar is played. There were times during the early part of the concert, where I wondered if there was a guitar or a lute in the orchestra, playing harmonies over the rhythm of the pieces.

Tafelmusik harpsichordist Charlotte Nediger, who has been a member of the orchestra for over 30 years (though she is still in her early 50s), explained that the harpsichordist plays the bass part with one hand, and with the other hand “like a jazz musician, I can do pretty much whatever I want as long as I follow the chord professions of the piece we are playing.”

St. James Church was built with acoustics in mind, and this particular performance, more than any of the others I have heard over the years in the church, took full advantage of that live sound.

The level of complexity and mathematical precision in the music of the Baroque composers, particularly J.S. Bach, required the 20 musicians in the orchestra to play different but complementary parts with precision timing. And while the musicians were clearly concentrating fully on the music during more complex passages, their body language was relaxed and full of swing and sway.

As I know little or nothing about Baroque music, I thought I would end this by quoting a master reviewer. Less than a week before the Sharbot Lake concert, the Tafelmusik orchestra performed the Bach Mass in B minor with the Tafelmusik Choir at their home base, the Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre in Toronto.

The music critic Ken Winters called the performance “matchless and sublime” in the headline to his review of the concert for the Globe and Mail newspaper.

Winters, tragically, died after a heart attack on February 15, the day after writing the review, ending a career as a music writer and broadcaster that had lasted over 50 years. He was 81.

The concluding paragraph of his review, the last paragraph he would ever publish, goes like this: “This choir and orchestra are deeply inside what they do. They listen raptly. They mean what they play and sing. There are no others quite like them.” 

 

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