Guest conductor Nicholas McGegan will lead the Music Academy of the West Chamber Orchestra in “A Baroque Evening” at 8 p.m. Saturday at First Presbyterian Church, 21 E. Constance Ave. in Santa Barbara.
The program includes four works: the Suite from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera, Naïs (1749); Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048; the Suite from Henry Purcell’s incidental music to Abdelazar or The Moor’s Revenge, a 1676 play by Aphra Behn; and the Suites in D Major and G Major from George Frideric Handel’s Water Music (1717).
The continued popularity of baroque music — however you choose to define “baroque” — is based, I think, on the simple fact that it seeks to do nothing but please in the moment of its performance. It doesn’t try to paint a picture or tell a story, still less to point a moral or establish a philosophical principle. Its extra-musical content is supplied exclusively by the listener. It does not, most of it, even try to make progress. It generally ends up back where it started.
“Music is feeling, then, not sound,” Wallace Stevens wrote in his famous poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” And yet, true as this might be in a psychological or emotional sense, it is not very accurate. Music — and baroque music above all — is only sound. Baroque music does all that music alone can do, without reference to words or images. As one of my most-admired masters, Robert Craft, wrote concerning Alexander Scriabin, “It seems to me, in any case, that if one wants something that is beyond music, music is not what one wants.”
The selections by Bach and Handel need not, perhaps, have been quite so familiar, although one never minds hearing them. A more daring schedule might have included one of Handel’s solo Italian Cantatas, or one of Bach’s solo German ones. Still, one can only applaud — and lustily, at that — McGegan’s decision to include the Suites by Purcell and Rameau. Purcell was easily the greatest of all English composers — even if you count Handel, whom I adore, as an English composer, and with Corelli, Monteverdi and Schütz, one of the greatest composers of the 17th century — “the century of Genius,” as Russell Kirk used to call it.
Of the four musicians on this program, only three made their careers in the early 18th century; only Purcell represents the 17th, which many would say was the zenith of the baroque.
Like all of the 17th-century composers I have heard, there is a somber tone to his music, a kind of gravitas, that was on its way out in the time of Bach, Handel and Rameau. One of the least interesting things about Purcell is that he died so young. The plague was still making regular visits to London in those days, and life was, as another 17th-century genius, Thomas Hobbes, said, “dull, nasty, brutish and short.” Yet, historical gender stereotypes to the contrary, the Aphra Behn who wrote Abdelazar was a woman playwright, and a successful one at that. Rameau is, for me, still a subject for further research. I like everything I have heard, but I haven’t heard that much. I have heard the Suite from Naïs, however, and it’s gorgeous.
Tickets for “A Baroque Evening” are $45. Click here, call 805.969.8787 or visit the box office an hour before the event.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.