The last “Tuesdays @ Eight” faculty chamber concert of the Music Academy of the West’s 2012 Summer Festival will take place at — wait for it — 8 p.m. Tuesday in Hahn Hall on the Miraflores campus.
The faculty will have the inestimable support of three visiting artists — violinist Glenn Dicterow and violists Karen Dreyfus and Cynthia Phelps.
The program for this valedictorian affair will include selections from François Couperin’s Concert Royaux, 1722 (performed by an Academy Fellow TBA on flute, Jeff Thayer on violin, Nico Abondolo on bass, Dennis Michel on bassoon and Natasha Kislenko on piano); Antonin Dvorak’s String Quartet in F-Major, Opus 96, “American”, (Dicterow and Thayer on violins, Dreyfus on viola and David Geber on cello); and Peter Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous sextet for strings, Souvenir de Florence (Dicterow and Kathleen Winkler on violins, Dreyfus and Phelps on violas, and Geber and an Academy Fellow TBA on cellos).
The Dvorak and the Tchaikovsky pieces will be familiar to most music lovers. The “American” String Quartet, in particular, seems to gain in prestige every year — thanks, mainly, to the spacious and haunting lento.
But the Russian and the Czech speak to us directly, as quasi contemporaries; their emotions are ours.
Couperin the Great, as the living composer was distinguished from the numerous other musical members of his family, is quite a bit more remote. In 1668, when Couperin was born, Louis XIV was already eight years into his personal reign, after the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1660 (having been crowned king in his sixth year, on the death of his father, in 1643), and yet these suites known as the Concert Royaux were performed before the same monarch, at Versailles, in 1714-15.
Couperin published the suites in 1722, without indicating any instrumentation. They could be played on a solo harpsichord, or by chamber ensembles. Most music historians believe that the pieces were composed for listening, not dancing. Their immense gravitas, their deep introspection, their preference for gesture over narrative, revive, by a kind of alchemy, the ancien regime, and the 17th century, in all its mortal complexity.
Couperin’s detachment is a little scary, but the music weaves a potent spell and the composer’s sense of melody is as true as his purpose is obscure.
Reserved seats to this concert are $40 (including Miraflores facility fee) and are available only from the Music Academy Ticket Office at 805.969.8787.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews.