Utrecht Early Music Festival 2022

View fullsize

It is a great pleasure for me to be back at the Oude Muziek Festival Utrecht! This year’s festival is mainly about galant music, a style that is not necessarily part of my standard solo repertoire, but very interesting to dive into. I particularly enjoyed exploring the field of galant ornamentation and the violinistic virtuosities.

Tuesday, 30 August
Coaching two fringe concerts

Friday, 2 September, 11:00, Tivoli Herz
A concert with early oboe quartets featuring Georg Fritz (oboe), Sonoko Asabuki (viola) and Daniel Rosin (cello). The genre “quatuor” derives from baroque trio sonatas (losing the continuo instrument but adding a tenor voice) and subsequently develops into classical chamber music forms such as the string quartet. The programme displays several of this hybrid late-baroque/ early-classical chamber music varying from a trio sonata where the two upper parts are divided among three players and a mini oboe concerto accompanied by three strings to a violin and cello prelude and fugue. Works by Janitsch, Boccherini, Molter, Albrechtsberger and Joh.Chr.Bach.

Friday, 2 September, 20:15, Tivoli Vredenburg
The oratorio “Die Israeliten in der Wüste” by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach with Gli Angeli Genève. Featuring Stephan MacLeod (bass/direction), Marie Lys and Zoe Bradshaw (soprano), Valerio Contaldo (tenor).

Saturday, 3 September, 22:30, Tivoli Herz
“Soirée Sarasin”, a programme with galant violin sonatas from the music collection of Lucas Sarasin accompanied by my dear colleagues Daniel Rosin (cello) and Johannes Keller (harpsichord). Sarasin was a member of one of Basel’s most important families in the 18th century, a silk producer, a collector of curious artefacts, and a very active amateur musician. Part of his house in Basel, constructed between 1763 and 1775 (the blue one on the right), is a music room where he enjoyed playing together with other amateurs as well as professional musicians. He employed the violinist Jacob Christoph Kachel as his private house composer and his musical archive contains an enormous amount of works by composers from all over Europe in various settings, including around eighty violin sonatas. Unfortunately these sonatas are lost, but many of the pieces can be found in other sources as well. The programme features a cello sonata by Willem de Fesch and violin sonatas by Fritz, Locatelli, Miroglio and Benda.

Sunday, 4 september
Coaching two fringe concerts