The Arcadia Players began their new season Saturday with a spectacular presentation of three keyboard concertos respectively for harpsichord, fortepiano, and the two instruments together, in the Wesley United Methodist Church in Hadley.
The church is remarkable for its breadth, in contrast to its short length. This means that the audience is quite close to the performers, whose broad stage is approached by a few steps. This concert, then, came close to the 18th-century ideal of chamber music, music performed in a drawing room by serious musicians for their friends.
The artistic director of the Arcadia Players, Ian Watson, gave a brilliant performance of Bach’s fifth Brandenburg Concerto, with the violinist Asako Takeuchi and the flautist Sarah Paysnick as fellow soloists. The “orchestra” consisted of six soloists, whose bass section, Alice Robbins (cello) and Andrew Arceci (double bass), provided a solid foundation here and in all the evening’s music.
This concerto is rightly famous for its cadenza for the harpsichord in the first movement, a brilliant exhibition piece for the instrument. Watson had played this concerto in Sage Hall of Smith College two years ago, and the contrast between hearing the harpsichord in a fairly large room and in the intimate surroundings of the Wesleyan church was remarkable for the resonance allowed to the instrument in the smaller room.
Then the fortepiano showed off its quite different tone, played with equally brilliant panache by Monica Jakuc Leverett on her own instrument, made in 2000 by Paul McNulty, its design based on one made in Vienna in about 1803. This fortepiano has a range of 5½ octaves and its curving case is of mahogany.
The concerto was Mozart’s K 449 0f 1784, which the composer arranged with a string quartet for the orchestra, supplemented for this performance by two baroque flutes, instruments made of boxwood with ivory fittings, which have a warmer tone than the modern metal flute.
Finally, Watson and Jakuc Leverett performed a rarely-heard concerto for the two keyboard instruments together, composed by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in 1788, the year of his death. The music, while pleasant to the ear, was hardly as demanding as that of “Father” Bach or Mozart, but it was a perfect vehicle to allow listeners to hear the difference between the older harpsichord, whose notes are produced by plucking the strings, and the newer and ultimately dominant fortepiano (now “pianoforte”), with its sound made by hammers striking the strings. In both this concerto and the Mozart the slow movements were of great beauty and performed with fine sensitivity.
Somewhat austere as this evening’s music was, it was a taste of the musical delights to come with Arcadia’s performance of Purcell’s “King Arthur” on Nov. 20 and their superb “Messiah” on Dec. 16.
On Sunday, a very different performance was given in Sage Hall at Smith College by Boris Berman, head of the piano department at Yale University and the teacher of the brilliant pianist Henry Kramer, currently a performer in residence at Smith.
Berman played the two books of 24 Préludes of Debussy, published in 1910 and 1913. This was an astonishing feat of memory and technique, warmly applauded by the audience.
Debussy was the giant who moved French and, indeed, European music away from the dominance of Germany and Austria (and most especially of Wagner) to music of greater freedom of form and emotion, often called (wrongly) Impressionism. Debussy’s intellectual and musical range was so much greater than that of his contemporaries who were moving in the same direction — Ravel in France, Scriabin in Russia, and Albeniz and Granados in Spain — and he was attuned to the changes in French poetry, notably those of the iconic Symbolist, Stephane Mallarmé.
These Préludes are more demanding in technique than most amateur pianists can achieve, although two pieces are often heard, “La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin” (The girl with the flaxen hair) and, perhaps best known, the deeply moving “La Cathédrale Engloutie” (The sunken cathedral).
Berman spared neither himself nor the piano, an astonishing performance in its range of sensitivity (for example, when Debussy is describing the wind or the scents of perfume) and power, great power. He generously played a Debussy encore. “La danse sous la pluie” (Dancing in the Rain), leaving his audience bemused and delighted by as brilliant playing as they are ever likely to hear.
Henry Kramer will give a recital Oct. 12 in Sage Hall of the music of Albeniz and Ravel.)