Foundling to play at National Gallery of Art

Sunday, May 17, at 6:30 pm in the West Building, West Garden Court, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

Foundling will perform music by contemporaries of Meléndez working in Madrid. The program includes a symphony, octet, and concert aria by Luigi Boccherini, a Gaetano Brunetti bassoon solo with bassoonist Anna Marsh, and features soprano and Artist-in-Residence Pamela Murray in Blas de Laserna's Tonadilla, "Las Musicas," a rarely heard theatrical work that uses music to poke fun at its 18th-century audience--a true precursor of cabaret!

The concert is free and open to the public.
Scroll down for complete program and notes.

Click below for more info on the exhibit

PROGRAM

Foundling Baroque Orchestra
Dana Maiben, Music Director; Margaret Cushing, Artistic Director;
Elisabeth Le Guin, Musical Advisor

 Luis and Luigi in Madrid
Music by Luigi Boccherini and Contemporaries
In honor of the exhibit “Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life”

Sinfonia 1 in D, 1765 (G490)                                                Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
Allegro
Andante grazioso
Allegro assai           

Andante “de fagotto obligato”                                                            Gaetano Brunetti (1744-17898)
Anna Marsh, bassoon soloist

Tonadilla: “Las musicas”                                                                        Blas de Laserna (1751-1816)
[Comienzo]: Allegro ~ Allegro ~ [Boleras, Allegretto]
Coplas: Allegro no mucho
Marcha ~ Cojea ~ [Musica funeraria] ~ Boleras ~ Allegro ~
Cencerros ~ Fandango ~ [Salida del toro] ~ Zorongo
Final: Allegro
Pamela Murray, soprano

Intermission

Notturno 4 in G, Opus 38 (1787) for Octet (G 470)                                    Boccherini
Andantino amoroso ma non Largo
  Minuetto
Finale: Allegro vivo

Aria accademica: “Care luci, che regnate”  (G 549)                                                Boccherini
Pamela Murray, soprano

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
May 17, 2009, at 6:30 p.m.

NOTES

Foundling
Luis and Luigi in Madrid ~ Notes on the Program

Musical life in Madrid during the time of Luis Meléndez was a rich and varied affair. The Italian style was very much the rage at court and in the Teatro de los Caños del Peral, the opera house supported by nobility, and Italian and Viennese chamber music was fashionable in the fashionable houses. The public theatres meanwhile offered a little bit of everything, from the occasional opera translated from the Italian to traditional Spanish regional songs and dances. Our program reflects this mixed musical culture with music by two Italians and one Spaniard: Luigi Boccherini, Gaetano Brunetti and Blas de Laserna, three of Meléndez’s contemporaries, all of whom made their careers in Spain and contributed to the musical life of mid- to late 18th-century Madrid.

The most widely known of the three, then as now, is Boccherini. Like Meléndez, like Haydn, and like many others of their generation throughout Europe, Boccherini worked for much of his career without consistent royal commissions for his creative compositional work. Many artists and composers of this generation relied on somewhat sporadic patronage and often sold their work by the piece to earn a living. Both Meléndez and Boccherini specialized in the “small works:” Meléndez in the still life, Boccherini in chamber music. Both essayed works in the larger, more prestigious forms – portraiture, landscape, opera, symphony --- but commissions were elusive. Each was a technical virtuoso in his chosen medium, able to marry intricate surface detail faultlessly and harmoniously with the overall purpose and form of a work. Each demonstrated a life-long fascination with texture, and both used it to define structural elements in their compositions. Meléndez had painted at least 44 still-lifes for the Prince of the Asturias, (later Carlos IV) but was never to gain a court position. Carlos IV, who was a violinist, engaged Boccherini occasionally at court, but the king’s own chamber ensemble, as well as the royal chamber orchestra, were dominated by the Brunetti family and had no permanent place for Boccherini.

Luigi Boccherini was born into a family of musicians in Lucca, Italy in 1743. By the age of 15 he had already visited Vienna several times, and was well on the way to making a name for himself as a composer as well as a cellist. A Florence diarist noted in 1761 that the 18-year-old “celebre suonatore di Violoncello” was greeted with well-earned applause for a concert of music by himself, which was “of a completely new kind.” This extraordinary musician—who would compose in virtually every Italian genre of his day and pioneer the string quintet—was publishing his works by 1767, when he began a concert tour that took him, via Paris, to Spain. (He would maintain relationships with his Paris publishers throughout his career.) In Spain he found work in an Italian opera company in Aranjuez that prospered under royal patronage. An appointment in 1770 to the service of the Infante Don Luis in Aranjuez as compositore e virtuoso di camera gave him a steady income and encouragement for his creative work until the Infante’s death in 1785. Around the same time as he entered the Infante’s service, Luigi married Clementina Pellicia, second soprano in the opera company, for whom his Arie Accademiche were likely written. Boccherini made Spain his home for the rest of his very fruitful career; his descendants live there still.

When Boccherini arrived in Madrid in 1768, he certainly brought with him his Sinfonia 1, composed in 1765, which opens our program. A version of it was used as the overture for a production of Nicolo Piccinini’s opera, La buona figliuola maritata, in Aranjuez in 1769, introducing Boccherini as a composer to the Spanish audience. It is scored for strings, oboes and horns, like the contemporaneous symphonies of Haydn, and is full of youthful exuberance and good humor. It still makes a good curtain-opener after 240 years!

Between works of Boccherini, we offer samples of the work of two other composers writing in quite different genres. The Andante “de fagotto obligato” is taken from a quintet for bassoon and strings by Gaetano Brunetti. Born in Italy, Brunetti moved with his parents to Madrid in 1762 at age 18; in 1767 he was employed as a violinist in the royal chapel in the service of Carlos III and remained in royal service for the rest of his life, becoming in due time Maestro de música de cámera for Carlos IV. Working on exclusive contract to a royal family often precluded publication (such was the case also with Haydn’s work for the Esterhazy court); most of Brunetti’s music remains unpublished to this day. The movement we have chosen to represent him is songful, even operatic in character, featuring the solo bassoon in a plaintive aria, accompanied by and in alternation with the strings. Perhaps one can hear in this opera-seria-styled work a not-so-distant musical ancestor of the Tango.

Tonada and tonadilla are terms that have been in continuous use in Hispanic music since the 16th century; the terms have referred and continue to refer to many different genres and practices, varying with time, context and place. In the later 18th century in Madrid, a tonadilla was a comic musical interlude for singer(s) and small orchestra, presented between acts of a play or opera, its satirical nature serving as a foil to the serious matter of the drama that surrounded it. As such the tonadilla closely resembled the contemporaneous Italian intermezzo in function and in style, the most significant difference being the frequent incorporation of traditional and regional Spanish musics. Over time, the genre became a formal repository for disappearing elements of Spanish folk music, and some feature attitudes, melodies and rhythms borrowed or derived from traditional musics, particularly those of the fandango, folía, jota, seguidilla, tirana, boleros, zorongo, and other Spanish dances.

Blas de Laserna specialized in the genre; he wrote at least 700 tonadillas, as well as music to plays, melodramas, and imported opera libretti,through a 40-year career in the theatre; this astonishing oeuvre makes him handily one of the most prolific composers of the entire 18th century. But like so many who have worked in the wings in show business, he was overworked and underpaid for most of his career. Born in Navarra in 1751, by 1774 he had found his way to Madrid and was writing music for the theater. He served as music director for the Teatro de la Cruz for nearly twenty years beginning in 1790, but by 1800 he was subsidizing his theater habit with various teaching and music copying jobs. He was a dedicated preservationist; in 1790 he proposed founding a school to preserve authentic Spanish musical traditions. Most of his extant work was never published, and survives in unique manuscript copies in the Municipal library in Madrid. Foundling’s own principal cellist and musical advisor Elisabeth Le Guin has made the tonadillas of Blas de Laserna a focus of study in recent years and has provided us with the edition of Blas de Laserna’s “Las Musicas” which you will hear today.

The Tonadilla “Las Musicas” is in three main sections. In the first the singer plays with the audience to get their attention, complains about having to perform at all and summarizes the novel devices she will use to entertain her audience and to keep herself from being bored:  her voice will describe and characterize the vices she sees in people every day (this is clearly directed toward those who witness her performance), and as she acts them out, “the music will say the rest. And since the defects are so various, the music will be varied for each.” In the second part, the Coplas, she carries out her promise; Laserna has written a series of clever, short instrumental character sketches that refer (often very obliquely) to common middle-class vices of the day such as cupidity, avarice, delusions of youthfulness, gambling addiction, etc. Each sketch is introduced by a brief sung description of the vice involved. This patchwork is further varied by two interludes in which the singer breaks off from her catalog of vices to apostrophize the audience directly, saying, in effect, “If you don’t like what you’re hearing, then just change your ways!” (It is not incidental that these challenges to the audience are set to the most overtly arrogant Spanish dance of the day, the Boleras).  The Final unleashes all the composer’s (and singer’s) virtuoso capabilities in a fabulous display of coloratura and bravura.

Though just as amiable in nature as his early symphony, Boccherini’s Notturno that opens the second half of the program is of an entirely different character. It is a much more sophisticated, dynamic and expressive work, full of textural detail and rich tonal coloring. For this work Boccherini has added 3 winds to his “signature” ensemble, the string quintet with 2 cellos.  Here is Boccherini at his lyrical best, intimate, conversational, soave, generous.

The Aria Accademica that ends our program returns to symphonic scoring, presented here in our chamber symphony configuration. Composed to a text by Metastasio, Boccherini’s setting follows a common practice among composers of his day, taking a single aria from the libretto of an opera that had been set by another composer, and perhaps by more than one. The text “Care luci, che regnate” originated in the opera Issipile, first set by Francesco Bartolomeo Conti in 1732 in Vienna. The aria is given to Jason, who bids a wistful farewell to his sweetheart as he sets sail with the Argonauts; Boccherini’s setting for soprano and orchestra was probably intended for performance at a Spanish salon or academy modeled after the famous Accademia Arcadiana (Arcadian Academy) in Rome.

When Boccherini’s wife and his patron Don Luis both died in 1785, King Carlos III granted him a pension considerably smaller than his earnings had been; he was apparently passed up for a promised appointment to the Capilla Real in favor of Gaetano Brunetti’s 20-year-old son, Francesco. For most of the rest of his life Boccherini relied for his income largely on the sale of his compositions to his Paris publishers and on a patchwork of private patronage from near and far. But it is precisely because Boccherini sent his work abroad and sold many works for publication that we have access to so much of it today. The popular market for chamber music all over 18th-century Europe welcomed the sonorous, sensuous music emerging from Boccherini’s musical imagination. Meléndez has had a more limited audience for his work; finally it too is reaching a wider public. Like Meléndez, Boccherini’s artistry lay in capturing the intricacy of a moment in astonishingly lustrous and intimate detail, leaving us amazed that we can be so moved by art so deceptively direct, so technically accomplished, and yet so seemingly simple.

--Dana Maiben, Elisabeth Le Guin