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the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There. The Harmony of the Spheres I VIVALDI Concerto for 2 violins in A Major, op. 3, no. 5 Allegro – Largo Music from Phaeton LULLY Ouverture Suite des quatre saisons (Dances for the Four Seasons) Entrée des furies (Entrance of the Furies) Chaconne 2 pm Sunday, November 9 Tafelmusik Baroque orchestra The Folly Theater The William T. Kemper International chamber Music series The International Chamber Music Series is underwritten, in part, by the William T. Kemper Foundation Additional support is also provided by: THE GALILEO PROJECT: MUSIC OF THE SPHERES Programmed and scripted by Alison Mackay Glenn Davidson, Production Designer/Technical Director Marshall Pynkoski, Stage Director John Percy, Astronomical Consultant Shaun Smyth, narrator TAFELMUSIK BAROQUE ORCHESTRA Jeanne Lamon Music Director Jeanne Lamon, violin Patricia Ahern, violin Thomas Georgi, violin Aisslinn Nosky, violin Christopher Verrette, violin Julia Wedman, violin Cristina Zacharias, violin Patrick G. Jordan, viola Stefano Marocchi, viola Christina Mahler, violoncello Allen Whear, violoncello Alison Mackay, bass John Abberger, oboe Marco Cera, oboe Dominic Teresi, bassoon Lucas Harris, lute/guitar Olivier Fortin, harpischord Rick Banville, Lighting Director Raha Javanfar, Production Assistant Beth Anderson, Tour & Stage Manager

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Page 1: Tafelmusik Baroque orchestra - The Friends of Chamber · PDF fileTafelmusik Baroque orchestra ... GALILEI Toccata for solo lute, from Il primo libro d’intavolatura di liuto MARINI

the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.

The Harmony of the Spheres I

VIVALDI Concerto for 2 violins in A Major, op. 3, no. 5 Allegro – Largo

Music from Phaeton

LULLY Ouverture Suite des quatre saisons (Dances for the Four Seasons) Entrée des furies (Entrance of the Furies) Chaconne

2 pm Sunday, November 9

Tafelmusik Baroque orchestraThe Folly Theater

T h e W i l l i a m T. K e m p e r I n t e r n at i o n a l c h a m b e r M u s i c s e r i e s

The International Chamber Music Series is underwritten, in part, by the William T. Kemper Foundation

Additional support is also provided by:

THE GALILEO PROJECT: MUSIC OF THE SPHERESProgrammed and scripted by Alison Mackay Glenn Davidson, Production Designer/Technical Director

Marshall Pynkoski, Stage Director John Percy, Astronomical Consultant

Shaun Smyth, narrator

TAFELMUSIK BAROQUE ORCHESTRAJeanne Lamon Music Director

Jeanne Lamon, violinPatricia Ahern, violin

Thomas Georgi, violinAisslinn Nosky, violin

Christopher Verrette, violinJulia Wedman, violin

Cristina Zacharias, violin Patrick G. Jordan, violaStefano Marocchi, viola

Christina Mahler, violoncelloAllen Whear, violoncello Alison Mackay, bassJohn Abberger, oboeMarco Cera, oboeDominic Teresi, bassoonLucas Harris, lute/guitarOlivier Fortin, harpischord

Rick Banville, Lighting DirectorRaha Javanfar, Production Assistant

Beth Anderson, Tour & Stage Manager

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Music from the Time of Galileo

MONTEVERDI Ritornello, from Orfeo Ciaccona, after Zefiro torna

MERULA Ciaccona

GALILEI Toccata for solo lute, from Il primo libro d’intavolatura di liuto

MARINI Passacaglia

MONTEVERDI Moresca, from Orfeo

INTERMISSION

PURCELL Song Tune “See, even night herself is here,” from Fairy Queen Rondeau from Abdelazer

The Dresden Festival of the Planets

RAMEAU Entrée de Jupiter (Entrance of Jupiter) from Hippolyte et Aricie

HANDEL Allegro from Concerto grosso in D Major, Op. 3, No. 6

RAMEAU Entrée de Venus (Entrance of Venus) from Les surprises de l’Amour TELEMANN Allegro from Concerto for 4 Violins in D Major

ZELENKA Adagio ma non troppo from Sonata in F Major, ZWV 181/1 RAMEAU Entrée de Mercure (Entrance of Mercury) from Platée

LULLY Air pour les suivants de Saturne (Air for the Followers of Saturn) from Phaeton WEISS Allegro from Concerto for Lute in C Major

ANONYMOUS, 18th century The Astronomical Drinking Song

The Harmony of the Spheres II

BACH Sinfonia “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” (How brightly Shines the Morning Star) after BWV 1 Sinfonia after BWV 29

2014 / 2015 Season Presenting Sponsor

This tour is generously supported by:

The Galileo Project received its premiere in January 2009 at The Banff Centre where it was co-produced in a residency.

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the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.

p r o g r a m n o t e s

The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres was created as Tafelmusik’s contribution to the International Year of Astronomy, marking 2009 as the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s development and use of the astronomical telescope. The performance uses music, words and images to explore the artistic, cultural and scientific world in which 17th- and 18th-century astronomers lived and did their work. In late 16th-century Florence, the house of the lutenist and composer Vincenzo Galilei (father of the famous Galileo) was a fertile breeding ground for important innovations in the realms of music and of science. Vincenzo’s experiments with the expressive power of accompanied solo song influenced the creation of opera as a musical form and the style of music that we now describe as “baroque.” He also conducted repeated trials with lute strings to find the mathematical formulas that express the relationships between length, tension and musical pitch. He is thought to have been assisted in these experiments by his oldest son, Galileo Galilei, a brilliant young teacher of mathematics who went on to apply his expertise to world-changing discoveries about the universe. Galileo inherited his spirit of scientific inquiry and love of playing the lute from his father, therefore, it is fitting that a musical tribute should honor an astronomer whose intellectual and artistic vitality stemmed from a place where music and science intersected. Performances of The Galileo Project around the world have brought us into contact with scientists, star-gazers and music lovers in many diverse communities, greatly enriching our orchestral life. Ancient civilizations depended on an awareness of the natural world for their livelihood and survival, and enjoyed an intimate relationship with the daily, monthly and yearly patterns of the night sky. The Greeks and Romans identified characters in their mythological stories with planets and stars, and gave them names that we still use today. In Ovid’s story of Phaeton, the impetuous son of the sun god Apollo, the minutes, hours, days and seasons are personified as denizens of the palace of the sun. At Versailles, the French “Sun King,” Louis XIV, created his own palace of the sun, a building that strongly reflected the cosmology of the ancient world in its statuary and decoration. Jean-Baptiste Lully, the resident composer at Versailles, wrote some of his most

magnificent music for his opera Phaeton. We include excerpts from the opera in our concert as an example of the cultural inheritance that the world of baroque music received from the observations of ancient stargazers. The first important opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo, was composed in 1607 and published in Venice in 1609, the year that Galileo travelled from Padua to Venice to offer his newly created telescope as a gift to the Venetian Doge. Monteverdi and Galileo were exact contemporaries and near the end of their lives Galileo arranged for Monteverdi to procure a beautiful Cremonese violin (probably built by Nicolo Amati) for his nephew Alberto Galilei, the son of Galileo’s brother Michelangelo who composed the lute solo in the first half of our programme. Monteverdi, Tarquinio Merula and Biagio Marini were the most important composers in Galileo’s world and we present some of their most beautiful works as a backdrop to his own account of his discovery of the moons of Jupiter and the events that followed. In spite of the efforts of the Inquisition to suppress his discoveries and writings, Galileo’s influence was soon felt throughout Europe and the telescope was adopted as a tool for astronomical research. England’s most important astronomer, Isaac Newton was born within a year of Galileo’s death and was buried in 1727 in Westminster Abbey near the tomb of Henry Purcell. This period saw the establishment of a Royal Observatory in Greenwich, Newton’s creation of the reflecting telescope, his discoveries about the properties of refracted light, and his development of the principles of universal gravitation. Newton used the musical analogy of a seven-note scale in explaining the seven colours of the rainbow, but unlike Galileo, he does not appear to have been a music lover. After having been to hear Handel play a concert, he complained that there was nothing to admire except the elasticity of his fingers. George Frideric Handel made more of a sensation when he travelled from his adopted country of England to his homeland of Germany in order to play at a glittering royal wedding celebration in Dresden in September of 1719. It was a month-long “Festival of the Planets” with numerous operas, balls, outdoor events and special concerts in honour of each of the known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. (Uranus was discovered in 1781 by oboist, organist, composer and amateur astronomer, Sir William Herschel

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who, like Handel, had moved to England from Hanover. Herschel also built the largest and finest telescopes of his day, catalogued nebulae and discovered infrared radiation with the help of his musician sister Caroline, the discoverer of several comets.) There are detailed archives of the musical events at the 1719 Festival of the Planets, and we know that not only Handel but also Georg Philipp Telemann, who was living in Frankfurt at the time, joined the renowned musicians employed by Augustus the Strong in Dresden. These included double-bass player Jan Dismas Zelenka and Silvius Leopold Weiss, Europe’s most famous lutenist. We present excerpts from works by these four composers, and we are grateful to Lucas Harris for his reconstruction of the missing parts from Weiss’s Lute Concerto in C Major. All that survives of the original is the solo lute part, although the title page confirms that the lute was accompanied by two violins, viola and violoncello. Our program begins and ends with reflections on the ancient concept of the “Music of the Spheres,” thought to have been created by a heavenly ensemble of planets and stars making music together as they move through space. The concert’s opening speech from The Merchant of Venice contains Lorenzo’s beautiful expression of this idea: “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st but in his motion like an angel sings, still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.” The subject was treated extensively in Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the World, 1619) by Johannes Kepler, who used the formulas from his laws of planetary motion to derive musical intervals and short melodies associated with each planet. We perform these short tunes on their own, and then weave them into the chorale tune “Wie Schön Leuchtet der Morgenstern,” (How Brightly Shines the Morning Star). This is followed by music adapted from the opening sinfonia movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata of the same name, BWV 1, and from the opening sinfonia of Bach’s Cantata BWV 29. We have chosen these works by Bach to end our concert because they speak profoundly and eloquently of the wonders of the cosmos and the achievements of the human spirit. Program Notes by Alison Mackay / Tafelmusik ©2012

Found a word or phrase that you are unfamiliar with? Check out our extensive Glossary beginning on page 118 to discover the meaning.

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra

Hailed as “one of the world’s top baroque orchestras” by Gramophone Magazine, Tafelmusik was founded in 1979 by

Kenneth Solway and Susan Graves, and has been under the inspired leadership of Music Director and Concertmaster Jeanne Lamon since 1981. At the heart of Tafelmusik is a group of talented and dynamic permanent members, each of whom is a specialist in historical performance practice. Delighting audiences worldwide for more than three decades, Toronto-based Tafelmusik reaches millions of people through its touring, critically acclaimed recordings, broadcasts, new media, and artistic/community partnerships. The vitality of Tafelmusik’s vision clearly resonates with its audiences in Toronto, where the orchestra performs more than 50 concerts every year for a passionate and dedicated following. Tafelmusik maintains a strong presence both nationally and on the world stage, performing in over 350 cities in 32 countries. Tafelmusik has released over 75 CDs on the Analekta, Sony Classical, CBC Records, BMG Classics, Hyperion and Collegium labels, and has been awarded numerous international recording prizes, including nine JUNO Awards. In 2012 Tafelmusik announced the creation of its own label, Tafelmusik Media, and has released a number of new and past recordings. Among recent releases are live-performance CDs of Handel Messiah and Beethoven Eroica Symphony, and DVDs of three of Tafelmusik’s most popular performance events: Sing-Along Messiah, and Alison Mackay’s The Galileo Project, and House of Dreams. The Galileo Project premiered in Banff and Toronto in January 2009, and has toured across Canada and the US, and in Mexico, Malaysia, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. The orchestra was honoured by the International Astronomical Union, who named an asteroid after Tafelmusik in recognition of this project.

Visit www.tafelmusik.org for more information. Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra appears courtesy of Colbert Artists Management

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the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.

l i n d a h a l l l i b r a r y c o l l a b o r at i o n

The celestial or divine monochord, engraved by Mathew Merian for Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi … historia (History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm, Oppenheim, 1617-1618). The diagram links the notes of the Greek musical

scale with the orbits of the planets, suggesting a mathematical basis for the harmony of the spheres.

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Pre-Concert Lecture, November 9 at 1 p.m. Galileo, Kepler, and the Harmony of the Spheres with William B. Ashworth, Jr.Beginning in 1609, Galileo used the newly-invented telescope to discover craters on the moon, satellites around Jupiter, and stars in the Milky Way. At about the same time, Johannes Kepler discovered the laws that regulate the motion of the planets around the sun. For Kepler, his discoveries were part of a search for the harmony of the spheres, an idea that had been around since Pythagoras, and which Kepler fervidly embraced. Galileo showed us a new kind harmony of, revealing that earth and heavens are one, and not the two separate worlds envisioned by Aristotle. The illustrated talk will discuss the ancient origins of the idea of a harmony of the spheres, look at the role it played in the work of Galileo and Kepler, and examine why, by the time of Isaac Newton, the idea of a harmony of the spheres had faded from the scientific world.

Visions of the Spheres – A Display of Images from Original Documents of the Renaissance Shareholder’s Room at the Folly TheaterAncient concepts of the stars and planets placed them in crystalline spheres, centered on and moving around a stationary earth. This graphic display of images from rare books from the time of Galileo illustrates that concept of the cosmos – the one that Galileo learned -- and how Galileo and others changed it with revolutionary thinking and observations. New images of the stars and of the cosmos allowed their viewers to imagine a new universe that was truly out of this world.Curator: Bruce Bradley, Linda Hall Library of Engineering and Science

The Linda Hall Library The Linda Hall Library (LHL) is the world’s foremost independent research library devoted to science, engineering and technology. Since 1946, scholars, students, researchers, academic institutions, and businesses throughout the Kansas City region, the nation, and around the world have used the Linda Hall Library’s collections to learn, investigate, invent, explore and increase knowledge.

Hundreds of people of all ages attend the Library’s public programs each year to expand their awareness and understanding of science and technology. A not-for-profit, privately funded institution, the Library is open to the public free of charge. BIOS

William B. Ashworth, Jr. William B. Ashworth, Jr. is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, and Consultant for the History of Science at the Linda Hall Library. He has a PhD in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has a special interest in Renaissance and Baroque science, especially early scientific illustration. He teaches courses at UMKC on the Scientific Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution and, for the Linda Hall Library, he advises on rare book acquisitions, organizes exhibitions, writes exhibition catalogues, offers a regular lecture series, and writes two daily blogs on scientific anniversaries, one of which can be accessed on the LHL website.

Bruce Bradley Bruce Bradley is the Librarian for History of Science at the Linda Hall Library, where he serves as curator for the library’s special collection of rare books in the history of science and technology. He administers an active program of rare book acquisitions, oversees the security and preservation of the collection, and assists library researchers and visitors in need of access to the collection. Through the acquisitions program, the library was able to acquire at auction a first edition of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger, Venice, 1610), the first book by Galileo to report on his startling observations with a telescope. Other books by Galileo and by his contemporaries have also been acquired for the collection. Bruce works with visiting groups and gives special classes and presentations on aspects of the history of science and rare books. He participates in the library’s exhibition program of rare books, which is offered to local visitors and, through the library’s website, to virtual visitors around the world. He has degrees in history and library science from Carleton College and the University of Illinois.