Saturday, November 4, 2017

me & arcangelo corelli



    Playing along with a recording of the Christmas Concerto by Arcangelo Corelli has turned out to be one of the greater musical delights I've gotten myself into. However, at least one apology is in order - about the rasp of the bow on the strings you'll hear at quiet parts (sometimes the notes don't 'speak'), a function of needing to get my bow re-haired and having not sufficiently removed the rosin from the strings before playing this. But my heart is really in this. And I think you'll get that. I also treasure the piece because I first played it at Middlebury, in my sophomore year, Larry Grob as my violin duet partner. It was and remains a musical highlight of my life.
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    I'll try to amend my garbled spoken intro. The back and forth I talk about between me & my brilliant friend Reed Woodhouse which led me to look for & re-discover the Corelli had to do with this: Reed is a champion of Purcell, whose mastery of counterpoint and very individual uses of it in a huge variety of forms make him inarguably a major baroque composer. To me Purcell sounds antique despite all this & I became curious about how much contact Purcell had particularly with Italian baroque music: was it even fully formed by his time? Then I thought of Arcangelo Corelli (1653 -1713 ), who was born six years before Purcell (1659 - 1695) and whose Christmas Concerto, although apparently not performed until the early 1700s was written in 1690. (Very little of Corelli's music seems to have survived, but his concerto is so complete an example of the style, the style has to have been known; it couldn't have sprung whole from nothing.) So it seemed likely Purcell would have heard a fair amount of Italian baroque music in full bloom (I know he traveled in Italy). And yet he remained Purcell: resisting the Italian model to some degree. (Of course none of this matters really. He was great and so was Corelli!)
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    Anyway I hope you enjoy what's transpired here. I played along with a recording which featured readable music, since I don't have the sheet music myself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RydMnTCwJvQ )
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    but I first found a more wonderful recording I urge you to listen to conducted by violinist Gerald Elias
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    https://www.youtube.com/watch…
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    whom I knew way back in the day (like junior high) in various Long Island string festivals - he along with Joseph McGauley and John Connelly whom I also knew back then & with whom I've reunited via Facebook have had stellar careers as violinists, which lord knows I cannot claim for myself. But we were all sort of in the running back in the day. (I wasn't the only Long Island kid going to Juilliard Prep.) All of the above has made this Corelli a treat for me to reune with. 

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