calimac

I tend to go for music of later periods most of the time, but an occasional all-Baroque concert can really refresh the soul.

Bernard Labadie is a fairly young Quebecois practitioner of the "the faster, the better" school of Baroque conducting. We got all of all three of the suites comprising Handel's Water Music, with the slow movements whizzing on by as hastily as the fast ones. And since this was the Water Music, we also got, along the way, about half a dozen of the all-time catchiest tunes ever written. Orchestration for this work is somewhat optional; Labadie opted to include drums in the D Major suite.

That was Handel the bluff Englishman. Handel the emotionally sensitive Italian (which he was for a few years) offered a secular cantata, O Numi Eterni, a one-woman tour de force depicting Lucretia's cry for vengeance after her rape. (One need not know much Italian to recognize the word vendetta appearing a lot.) The one woman was mezzo Jane Irwin, who sang entirely from memory in a resonant voice, smoothly articulated through her character's distress. Not much pure vocal display: in this work Handel's concern is to convey raw emotion within the Baroque vocabulary. The accompaniment was a bare continuo of only five instruments: harpsichord, lute(!), cello, double bass, and bassoon. So this was hardly an orchestral work at all, but no less welcome for it.

Also on the program, J.S. Bach's Suite No. 4, another trumpet-and-drum work like the Water Music. The Bourree and Gavotte of this one are particularly familiar.