This afternoon’s San Francisco Early Music Society recital at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church featured the historical-instruments ensemble Harmonia Felice. The performers were violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and Katherine Kyme, cellists Amy Brodo and William Skeen (who also performed on gamba), and harpsichordist Katherine Heater. The title of the program was Le Virtuose Sublime—Music of the French Baroque, and every member of this ensemble had an opportunity to display that virtuosity on his/her instrument. What was particularly interesting, however, was that two rather different approaches to virtuosity emerged from the selections on the program.
The “sublime” form of virtuosity involved the skilled command of the intricacies of execution. This was most evident in the compositions of the pioneering female composer Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, who dominated the program with three compositions, one violin sonata and two trio sonatas. Despite the distinctions in title, de la Guerre showed particular interest in extending the need for virtuosity from the violins down to the gamba, thus requiring this continuo instrument to participate actively in the exchange of melodic passages. Brodo was clearly comfortable with this “escalated” level of participation, adding to the “conversation” with the same facility contributed by Blumenstock and Kyme. This kind of virtuosity was equally well displayed in ensemble compositions by Jean-Baptiste Senaillé, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, and François Couperin.
However, there was also a more “flamboyant” virtuosity emerging from more reduced resources. This was most evident in a harpsichord solo by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer entitled “La Marche des Scythes.” Based on the score of his ballet-héroïque(actually an opera) Zaïde, reine de Grenade (Zaïde, Queen of Grenada), this is a rondeau based on his “Air pour les Turcs” (and presumably the Turkic influence on Scythia) in which the harpsichordist must execute one wild fantasy passage after another between the repetitions of the rondeau theme. One might go so far as to call Royer the Franz Liszt of the eighteenth century, given the demands he placed on the keyboardist, all of which were probably based on his own skills. A more moderate, but still impressive, burst of such flamboyance could also be found in Jean-Marie Leclair’s sonata for two violins without continuo. These two compositions allowed Heater, Blumenstock, and Kyme to depart from the more “polite” exhibitions of virtuosity that dominated the program; and the performances of both of these works brought down the house as the audience was shaken from its more “sublime” mood.
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