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2 | For Tickets and More: sfperformances.org | 415.392.2545 present… PAUL O’DETTE | Lute  Saturday, April 28, 2018 | 7:30pm St. Mark’s Lutheran Church Robin is to the Greenwood Gone ANONYMOUS Up Tails All I cannot keep my wife at home Robin is to the Greenwood Gone John come kiss me now DANIEL BACHELAR Pavan & Galliard (1572–1618) Mounsieur’s Almaine FROM THE MURE OF I never knew I loved thee ROWALLAN’S LUTE Corne Yards BOOK The Gypsies Lilt Rowallan Castle, A Scots Tune Scotland (1620) Another Scots Tune JOHN JOHNSON Omnino Galliard (d. 1594) A Pavan to Delight A Galliard to Delight Carman’s Whistle INTERMISSION +

Transcript of INTERMISSION - sfperformances.org · The Complete Lute Music of John Dowland JOHN DOWLAND A Fancy...

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present…

PAUL O’DETTE | Lute  

Saturday, April 28, 2018 | 7:30pmSt. Mark’s Lutheran Church

Robin is to the Greenwood Gone

ANONYMOUS Up Tails All I cannot keep my wife at home Robin is to the Greenwood Gone John come kiss me now

DANIEL BACHELAR Pavan & Galliard (1572–1618) Mounsieur’s Almaine

FROM THE MURE OF I never knew I loved theeROWALLAN’S LUTE Corne Yards BOOK The Gypsies Lilt Rowallan Castle, A Scots Tune Scotland (1620) Another Scots Tune

JOHN JOHNSON Omnino Galliard (d. 1594) A Pavan to Delight A Galliard to Delight Carman’s Whistle

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ARTIST PROFILE

Tonight, Paul O’Dette makes his San Francis-co Performances debut.

“…should I come to meet Saint Peter at the pearly gates, I hope he will say, ‘Wel-come, good and faithful servant! By the way, be sure to hear Paul O’Dette—he’s leading the angel band.’” Early Music Amer-ica, Spring 2011

Paul O’Dette has been described as “the clearest case of genius ever to touch his instrument.” (Toronto Globe and Mail). One of the most influential figures in his field, O’Dette has helped define the tech-nical and stylistic standards to which 21st-century performers of early music aspire. In doing so, he helped infuse the perfor-mance practice movement with a perfect combination of historical awareness, idiomatic accuracy, and ambitious self-expression. His performances at the major international festivals in Boston, Vienna, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Mu-nich, Prague, Milan, Florence, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona, Tokyo, Moscow, St. Pe-tersburg, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Mel-bourne, Adelaide, Los Angeles, Vancou-ver, Berkeley, Bath, Montpellier, Utrecht, Bruges, Antwerp, Bremen, Dresden, Inns-bruck, Tenerife, Copenhagen, Oslo, Cordo-ba, etc. have often been singled out as the highlight of those events.

Paul O’Dette has made more than 140 recordings, winning two Grammys, receiv-ing seven Grammy nominations and nu-merous other international record awards. The Complete Lute Music of John Dowland

JOHN DOWLAND A Fancy (5) (1563–1626) A Pavan The King of Denmark’s Galliard A Fancy (6) Farewell

The Lady Laiton’s Almaine Lachrimae The Frog Galliard Fantasie (1)

Paul O’Dette performs on an eight-course lute by Paul Thomson, Bristol, 1991 after Vendelio Venere (1582).

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PROGRAM NOTES

“The Queen came there too, recognised and summoned me. She spoke a long while with me, and invited me to leave my boat and take a seat in the Treasurer’s Barge. She then had her boat laid alongside and played the lute.” Baron Breuner (June 1559)

History has a habit of briefly placing a large number of extraordinarily talented artists from the same discipline in the same place at the same time, only to see the center of activity wane or move to another location. One thinks of Italian Renais-sance architects and painters, 15th-centu-ry Flemish composers, Elizabethan poets, 17th-century Dutch painters and 17th-cen-tury Cremonese violin makers. The period between 1580 and 1620 is often referred to as the “Golden Age of English Lute Music” since nearly 2000 lute pieces have survived from this era, more than double the com-bined repertoire of madrigals and virginal music, many of which are by the greatest composers of the age! In a sonnet pub-lished in Francis Pilkington’s Second Set of madrigals (1624), William Webb character-ized the stature of these English masters as follows: “...the Matchlesse Excellencies of Bird, Bull, Dowland, Morley and the rest of our rare Artists, (who now dim the lights of other lands)...”

In addition to works by famous masters, a large portion of this repertoire, particu-larly sets of variations on ballad tunes, survives without attribution. Many of these, including Up Tails All, Robin is to the Greenwood gone and John come kiss me now, are clearly the work of accomplished com-posers, but the sources simply neglected to identify the authors, either because the scribes were unsure themselves, or they knew so well who the composers were they did not need to remind themselves by writ-ing the names down. These works can thus only be ascribed to the prolific and ever-elusive Anonymous.

The first great English lutenist was John Johnson. He was appointed “royal lew-ter” in 1579, and remained at the Elizabe-than court until his death in 1594. Almost nothing is known of his life, background or training, but his music reveals an im-mensely inventive musical personality with a flamboyant approach to the instru-ment. A Pavan to Delight was Johnson’s most popular piece, surviving in 36 differ-ent manuscripts in settings for solo lute, lute duet, broken consort, keyboard and cittern. It is likely he composed the piece for solo lute and that the other versions are

arrangements of the lute version. Two ver-sions of Johnson’s setting of Carman’s Whis-tle survive, each with different variations. While each setting is filled with attractive variations, neither version includes an ending that fulfills the promise of the rest of the piece. Indeed, after hearing Julian Bream’s brilliant embellishment of the fi-nal variation 30 years ago, it is difficult for me to imagine this work without it and I have included it in this performance.

Long recognized as one of the finest Eng-lish lutenist-composers, almost nothing was known of the life and career of Daniel Bachelar until recently. Thanks to the tire-less work of a descendant, Anne Bachelar, we now know the years of his birth and death and a number of details about his career. Bachelar wrote sophisticated con-sort music for the household of Sir Francis Walsingham while still in his teens, and quickly developed a highly distinctive style, breaking new ground in lute tech-nique. His setting of Mounsieur’s Almaine is one of the great tour de forces in the lute repertoire making brilliant use of tremolo and arpeggio figures, the trademark of his novel approach to ornamentation.

In 1620, Sir William Mure of Rowallan compiled a manuscript containing ar-rangements of Scottish folk songs and dances, part of the exceptionally beauti-ful corpus of nearly 600 surviving Scot-tish lute pieces. While many of the works lack titles (they have been called Scots Tunes here), colorful titles such as I kissed her while she blushed and I long for thy vir-ginity can be found in other manuscripts. The sound of these pieces is surprisingly modern, but the sweeping pentatonic melodies, extraordinary dissonances, and snappy rhythms all serve to conjure up vi-sions of lochs and highlands. The refresh-ing simplicity reminds us that much can be said with little.

Known to his contemporaries as “The English Orpheus,” John Dowland was the most celebrated lutenist of the time and one of England’s greatest composers. His music was extraordinarily popular throughout Europe and was published in more cities than any other composer of the time. Despite this acclaim, Dowland remained bitter about being passed over for a position at the Elizabethan court, due in part to his conversion to Catholicism. His motto, “Semper Dowland semper do-lens” (“Always Dowland, always doleful”) represents not only his state of mind, but also his musical personality. At the same

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(a 5-CD set for harmonia mundi usa), was awarded the prestigious Diapason d’or de l’année, while The Royal Lewters has received the Diapason d’or, a Choc du Monde de la Mu-sique, a 5-star rating in BBC Music Magazine, 5-star rating in Goldberg and a perfect score of 10 from ClassicsToday.com. The Bachelar’s Delight: Lute Music of Daniel Bacheler was nominated for a Grammy in 2006 as “Best Solo Instrumental Recording.”

Mr. O’Dette is also active conducting Baroque operas. His recording of Char-pentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux En-fers with the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble won a Grammy for “Best Opera Recording of 2014,” as well as an Echo Klassik Award in the same category. In 1997 he led performances of Luigi Rossi’s L’Orfeo at Tanglewood, the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) and the Drottningholm Court Theatre in Sweden with Stephen Stubbs. Since 1999 they have co-directed performances of Cavalli’s Ercole Amante at the Boston Ear-ly Music Festival, Tanglewood, and the Utrecht Early Music Festival, Provenzale’s La Stellidaura Vendicata at the Vadstena Academy in Sweden, Monteverdi’s Orfeo and L’Incoronazione di Poppea for Festival Vancouver, Lully’s Thésée, Conradi’s Ari-adne (Hamburg, 1691), Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow, Lully’s Psyché, Monteverdi’s Poppea, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Stef-fani’s Niobe and Handel’s Almira for the Boston Early Music Festival. Their record-ing of Ariadne was nominated for a Gram-my as “Best Opera Recording of 2005,” Thésée in 2007 and Psyché in 2008. Both Lully recordings were also nominated for Gramophone awards. Their most re-cent opera recording, Niobe, was awarded a Diapason d’or de l’année, an Echo Klassik Award and the prestigious Jahrespreis der Deutschenschallplattenkritik. Paul O’Dette has guest directed numerous Baroque or-chestras and opera productions on both sides of the Atlantic.

In addition to his activities as a per-former, Paul O’Dette is an avid researcher, having worked extensively on the perfor-mance and sources of 17th-century Italian and English solo song, continuo practices and lute music. He has published numer-ous articles on issues of historical perfor-mance practice and co-authored the Dow-land entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Paul O’Dette is Professor of Lute and Director of Early Music at the Eastman School of Music and Artistic Director of the Boston Early Music Festival.

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O’Dette Notes continued from page 4

time, this rubric creates a one-sided im-pression of a multi-faceted musician. Dow-land’s doleful works are justly famous, but his lively pieces, galliards, almaines and jigs, evoke a humor and wit unmatched by any of his contemporaries. His works range from light-hearted dances, to soul-ful Pavans to virtuoso Galliards to sophis-ticated, contrapuntal fantasias. Lacrimae was the most popular lute piece of the era, existing in over 100 different versions for various instrumental combinations. Fare-

well is Dowland’s contrapuntal tour-de-force. The eerie, ascending chromatic line and gripping dissonances in the end of the piece were also used by Thomas Weelkes in the final section of his madrigal Cease sorrows now, setting it to the text, “I’ll sing my faint farewell.”

Ironically, the efforts of Dowland and his contemporaries to stretch the technical limits of lute playing may have precipitat-ed the decline of their instrument. In the 17th century, amateurs complained about the extreme difficulty of playing the lute and increasingly, they turned their atten-

tion to the guitar, which had fewer strings and was technically less demanding. Just 50 years after Dowland’s death, the lute was considered a “neglected and abused instrument.” Thomas Mace’s words of en-couragement to the lute in 1676 could not be any more appropriate today:

“Chear up, Brave Soul! And know that some Yet Living, who for Thee will take such Care, (there are) That Thou shalt be Restor’d Thy former Glory, And be Eterniz’d to Eternal Story.”

—Program Notes by Paul O’Dette