Chicago Classical Review

Apollo’s Fire’s “Winter Sparks” concert at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday night frequently lived up to its name. In the music’s liveliest moments, sparks indeed flew.

How much one enjoyed the evening likely boiled down to one question: Do bold shifts in tempo, dynamics, and articulation enliven Baroque music or are they mere gimmickry? Anyone who falls in the former camp surely beamed their way through the concert, as such shifts abounded.

Of course, one can also feel that the answer to this question depends on the composer or piece under consideration. The program’s six pieces were by four composers: two of the most popular (J.S. Bach and Vivaldi) and two who are not exactly household names (Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco and Marin Marais). 

There can be little doubt that Apollo’s Fire’s approach worked wonders in the Dall’Abaco and Marais pieces. The former was the concert’s opener: the Allegro and Passepieds from his Concerto à piu instrumental in E minor, Op. 5, no. 3, featuring two of the concert’s main soloists—flautist Kathie Stewart and oboist Debra Nagy. The Allegro was filled with swift crescendo swoops into climactic notes and the musicians rocked back and forth onstage to communicate the lilt of the passepied’s dance rhythms.

The Marais piece was a rearrangement of Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont de Paris by Apollo’s Fire’s music director and harpsichordist, Jeannette Sorrell. It is built on a three-note ostinato in the bass line, which represents the tolling of the bells of the title abbey. The original is for violin, viola da gamba, harpsichord, and basso continuo. Sorrell’s rearrangement replaces the viola da gamba with a cello and adds a trio of violins that interact with the solo violinist (concertmaster Alan Choo) in call-and-response fashion. What could have been an intellectual exercise (in layering lines on top of an ostinato) instead became a dialogue, in which Choo and the other violinists visually bounced lines back and forth at each other, while cellist Sarah Stone played some virtuosic passagework.

Nagy’s solo turn came in the first of the evening’s concertos, Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in A minor, RV 461. Nagy’s style was quite different from the rest of her Apollo’s Fire colleagues: her tone was warm, her phrasing tended toward the natural and the understated rather than the dramatic. But in the first movement, Sorrell and the ensemble seemed to temper their usual intensity to match Nagy. And in the remaining two movements, Nagy proved fully able to keep pace with all of Apollo’s Fire’s fermatas and sudden ritardandos.

Vivaldi’s other appearance on the program was in the concert’s closer: Winter from The Four Seasons, with Choo as soloist. Before they began the concerto, Sorrell remarked that people have forgotten that Vivaldi wrote into the score the specific image that each moment is meant to conjure. She explained the most important of these—shivering, blowing wind, stamping feet, chattering teeth, raindrops hitting a roof, ice cracking—while having the orchestra demonstrate each musical figure.

During the actual performance, Apollo’s Fire did everything possible to make these images vivid. Sorrell adding sweeping downward glissandi in the harpsichord to imitate wind. During the stamping passage in the first movement, the musicians actually stamped their feet. And even when there wasn’t a particular picture that needed to be painted, the musicians still found opportunities to make the music seem new, as evidenced in Choo’s highly ornamented rendition of the solo part in the second movement.

All of this fit Vivaldi’s aesthetic perfectly. But did it fit Bach in the two pieces by him: the Concerto for Two Violins (played by Choo and associate concertmaster Susanna Perry Gilmore) and the Orchestral Suite No. 2?

At times, the Bach pieces gave the impression that Apollo’s Fire needs fast, energetic music to thrive, as the concert’s only two lulls were the slow movements: The Largo of the Double Concerto was taken too quickly, with little poetry in the phrasing. And the Sarabande of the Orchestral Suite had mushy rhythms.

But elsewhere, Apollo’s Fire showed they could produce compelling interpretations without rhetorical fuss: The Ouverture of the Orchestral Suite was effectively pompous in its opening and contrapuntally clear in the fugal section. And the ensemble didn’t attempt to draw the spotlight away from Stewart in the Badinerie, but rather let her zip through it with the aplomb that the movement requires.

The point-making was ever-present in the other movements, however. The Polonaise in the Orchestral Suite featured a few swerves from forte to pianissimo that sounded more like Beethoven than Bach. The first movement of the Double Concerto featured heavy accents on downbeats in the opening phrases. Gilmore played her solo part fairly straight. But Choo frequently broke Bach’s long lines into shorter fragments, making single notes pop out of the texture. And in the finale, the tempo ground to half tempo at a few moments, so Choo could slowly ricochet a few strings of sixteenth notes.

Whether or not such flourishes are to everyone’s tastes, they inarguably brought drama, vitality, and (yes) fire to this music. And they made the Bach performances a welcome counterpoint to the tradition of treating him as merely a composer with brains, not brawn.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston. apollosfire.org

Posted in Performances
No Comments