Baroque arches

by Petar PLAMENOV

21 March (Monday), 19:00
Baroque arches

Soloists: Tanya Lazarova - soprano, Svetoslav Lazarov - grand piano
In the program: Hendel, Pergolesi, Mozart, Bach-Guno
Boris Hristov Music Center
Address:
Sofia, 43 Tzar Samuil Str.
Phone: 02 987 35 92
Entrance: 5 BGN

Baroque music expresses order, beauty, poise and the fundamental order of the universe. Yet it is always lively and tuneful. Baroque music is the type of music developed within the historical period of about 1600-1750, lorded over by Bach and Handel. It has dignity, elegant elaboration such as trills, turns, mordants and grace notes; it displays precise craftsmanship.Music which is melodious yet so constructed as to reflect the "perfect order" of the universe: that is the essence of the baroque. In the words of baroque composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux: "A composition meets the demands of good taste if it is well constructed, avoids trivialities as well as willful eccentricities, aims at the sublime, but moves in a natural ordered way, combining brilliant ideas with perfect workmanship."

These days more and more people are seeking a return to music for the mind, music combining beauty with the order of an underlying architecture and structure. So we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in the baroque, and those who are fortunate enough to be as yet unfamiliar with it have a wonderful experience awaiting them.

In the music of J. S. Bach, the different forms and styles of the baroque came together and were brought to perfection. Johann Sebastian Bach came from a musical family stretching back through many generations, and the Bachs were well-known throughout their "home ground" of Thuringia in what is now southeast Germany. Later in Bach's life, during his Leipzig years, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote that "no musician of any consequence visiting Leipzig would fail to call upon my father". 

Two major influences in Germany were the Church and the State, or rather, States. Neither Italy nor Germany existed then as we know them today. Germany was a complex mass of small princely states, each with its own Court and, with any luck, Court Musicians. Alliances came and went as princely families inter-married thus uniting, for a time anyway, their respective territories.Many a composer's fortunes rose or fell with the status accorded to music at the court in which he was serving, and composer-musicians would try to seek a position in a city or court where music was known, for the time being anyway, to be thriving under the patronage of an enthusiastic king or prince. The direction of Bach's music was influenced in his early years by several courts at which he was employed; the greater part of his working life however was spent in Leipzig where his position as Cantor of St Thomas' Church required church cantatas in abundance (200 have come down to us, some 100 more are supposed lost).

A brief look at the life of Handel illustrates both the mobility, and the influence of royal patronage on a composer typical of the baroque age. Georg Friederich Hдndel was born in Halle (Germany), on February 23rd,1685, just a month before J. S. Bach was born in Eisenach, not so far to the south. Handel's father intended him for the law, but his own musical inclinations soon prevailed. Following his studies in Germany, Handel went to Italy where he spent more than three years, in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice. In Rome he studied with Corelli, and no doubt met and exchanged ideas with a number of other Italian composers.

Handel left Italy early in 1710 and went to Hanover, where he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Elector, George Louis. The Royal Houses of Britain and Europe had always been closely inter-related, and England's Act of Settlement of 1701 which secured the Protestant succession to the Crown, placed George directly in the line of succession. In 1705 George was naturalized by Act of Parliament, and in August 1714 the death of Queen Anne made him King of England.  

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