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Love and loss ignite the first two 2024 concerts in New York City’s Aspect Chamber Music Series.
First up, on February 8, the early music ensemble A Golden Wire featuring soprano Nola Richardson and lutenist Kevin Payne play Baroque English love songs at a stylish new Aspect venue, Blue Gallery.
Next, on March 14, violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and pianist Wu Qian deliver autobiographically resonant works by Dvořák, Beethoven, and Smetana at Bohemian National Hall.
Love’s Sickness
The Feb. 8 concert, titled “Love’s Sickness: Music of the English Salon,” includes an illustrated talk by A Golden Wire’s harpist Parker Ramsey. Richardson and Payne will then join Ramsey and gambist Arnie Tanimoto in songs by Baroque-era composers including Henry Purcell, John Blow, William Lawes, and Marin Marais, as well as dramatist Thomas D’Urfey and other talents of the era.
Ramsey and Tanimoto are the core of A Golden Wire. They met while gigging with continuo groups around New York City and discovered “similar sensibilities about music, yes, but also the same sense of humor, which is incredibly important,” as Ramsey sagely told me.
The name “A Golden Wire” comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poet describes the music made in the heavens on the seventh day to celebrate the just-finished creation of the universe: “the Harp / Had work and rested not; the solemn Pipe / And Dulcimer, all Organs of sweet stop / All sounds on Fret by String or Golden Wire / Tempered soft Tunings, intermixed with Voice / Choral or Unison…”
Tanimoto’s viola da gamba indeed has frets, unlike the instruments of the modern violin family. And while Ramsey’s harp may not have strings of gold, it is a baroque triple harp modeled after Italian baroque instruments.
The viola da gamba, for its part, is a mainstay of the early music scene. But you’ll see a harp less often at such concerts. So I asked Ramsey what drew him to the instrument.
His mother, he said, is a professional harpist and an avid lover of early music. Ramsey grew up immersed in recordings of the Boston Camerata, and “started harpsichord lessons when I was 14. I eventually pursued a master’s in historical keyboards at Oberlin before doing a second master’s in modern harp at Juilliard. Once I was done with school, I combined the two disciplines together.”
Mastery and Expertise
This deep knowledge of historical instruments and the music of many eras has led Ramsey to become a recognized expert, and he will be the featured speaker at the Feb. 8 concert. Aspect concerts always include an illustrated talk, usually by a noted musicologist with expert knowledge, but not usually by one of the featured musicians! Ramsey, however, is an experienced and highly motivated educator: “I give a lot of masterclasses on the harp when I travel to perform, and I often think of my job as a performer as being one of advocacy for my instrument.
“Sure, people have seen the harp,” he added, “but the repertoire and the history is not so clear in their minds as it is with the piano and the violin. And so, I use every opportunity I can to talk and invite listeners to learn about (what I think is) the world’s most fascinating instrument.”
Tanimoto, too, is an educator as well as an eminent, award-winning musician, having recently joined the performance faculty at Princeton University. I was surprised to learn that he was Juilliard’s first-ever viola da gamba major. Is early music finally getting its props?
At the Aspect concert the pair will be joined by lutenist Kevin Payne and by soprano Nola Richardson, who is not only a celebrated singer and a writer but a good sport, having “graciously stepped in last minute for our last engagement with Aspect,” Ramsey said. “She was such a delight and so wonderfully musical that we knew we had to keep doing more.”
Richardson is also, he added, “a real superstar when it comes to early repertoire, so it’s a real honor to have her on board again.”
Weird and Wonderful
The theme of the concert, “Love’s Sickness,” comes from a song by Purcell. As Ramsey writes in his program notes:
It’s seldom that love is not intermingled with other emotions and can even destabilize us to the point of insanity. One song by Purcell, “I attempt from Love’s Sickness to flay [flee] in vain,” makes the point that it’s inescapable. Another, “Mad Bess of Bedlam” speaks to an inmate in Bedlam asylum who has been abandoned by her lover, and reframes her narrative by inserting herself into the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation” speaks to the fear that Virgin Mary has for her son’s path of obstinance and independence, and how the love for her son is inseparable from the sickening and foreboding notion she has that he will be doomed to die, leading her to try and talk to angels (who seemingly do not exist).
Some of the music is from composers less well known than Purcell. A Golden Wire’s stated focus on “underperformed and undiscovered repertoire” is borne out here with “music by [Purcell’s] forbears such as Nicholas Lanier, William Corkine, William Lawes and John Jenkins – all players of the viol and plucked instruments who were instrumental in keeping alive the tradition of courtly song.”
The program also crosses the Channel to illustrate the musical networking between England and other nations and the international careers of some of the musicians of the time – with a piece by Marin Marais, and a Chaconne by the Italian guitarist Francesco Corbetta, who worked both in the court of Charles II of France and in England.
Regarding the Corbetta song – “short but kind of wild, and contains a phasing passage like unto the music of Steve Reich” – Ramsey adds something that I always like to point out as well. “It helps give audiences a clue that there’s a lot of very weird and wonderful material from the period that defies our expectations.”
Love and Longing
Back at Bohemian National Hall, “From My Life” on March 14 will feature violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and pianist Wu Qian. They’ll play music by Dvořák, Beethoven, and Smetana. Musicologist Nicholas Chong (author of The Catholic Beethoven) will deliver the illustrated talk.
The last time I heard Sitkovetsy and Wu Qian it was at an Aspect concert on the theme of composers who had met in person – Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Grieg – and who didn’t necessarily have great respect for one another’s work.
This time around, the music is by a different trio of composers, and the “meeting” is a thematic one: All three works come from periods when their respective composers were in states of personal flux or crisis.
Dvořák was pining for home when he wrote his Sonatina in G major for violin and piano, Op. 100, B. 183.
The deaths of two of Smetana’s daughters may be discerned underlying his Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15.
Most famously, 1802 was notable in Beethoven’s life as the year he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament confessing his despair over his worsening deafness and his suicidal thoughts. He wrote his Violin Sonata No. 7, Op. 30 No. 2, in his “tragic key” of C minor that year.
But does knowing about a composer’s personal life inform and deepen a musician’s appreciation of the music? Sitkovetsky told me it does. He said that while it’s “interesting to learn about a composer’s life irrespective of which specific pieces you are playing, it’s also interesting to capture a specific timeline in their lives and see how their compositions could be affected.”
In particular, he said, “We know that Smetana wrote his trio in memory of his eldest daughter who died very young. The tragedy in the music is striking from the very first gesture, a solo violin cadenza which sounds like a cry full of desperation and anger.
“However, as the piece develops there are also such sweet and tender moments, for example the second subject of the opening movement or the first trio section in the second movement…it’s impossible not to feel the emotions that Smetana must have been going through while writing it.”
Far from Home
As for the Dvořák Sonatina, it “was in fact a gift for his children to play themselves,” the violinist explained. Though less technically challenging than some of his other works – “although there is no such thing as an easy piece by Dvorak…it has so much heart, warmth and charm. As with a lot of music he wrote while in the United States, the presence of Native American melodies are very prevalent in every movement of this beautiful piece, while his nostalgia for his homeland is always evident, especially in the beautiful slow movement.”
The Russian-British Sitkovetsky hails from a noted musical family and is a graduate of the Yehudi Menuhin School, London’s Royal Academy of Music, and the Kronberg Academy. In addition to his busy touring schedule, the in-demand violinist was recently named Artistic Director of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra.
Shanghai-born pianist Wu Qian is a founding member, with Sitkovetsy, of the Sitkovetsky Trio. Her recording of Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana was lauded as “one of the most spectacular readings…that I have ever heard…a fiery reading, explosively eloquent while radiantly persuasive.”
I always find eloquence plentiful at the Aspect Chamber Music Series. Fire and radiance too. And the more adverbs the better!
Qian and Sitkovetsky will be back in New York with their trio for the Summer at CMS Series at Lincoln Center, with other Trio performances also coming up in the U.S. and Europe.
A Maiden Voyage
They have known Canellakis for some time, but this will be the first time the three play together in one program.
However, “both Qian and I have known Nick for many years,” Sitkovetsy told me, “and have worked with him numerous times, mostly through the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He is a wonderful and truly a multifaceted artist; a great cellist, but also an arranger, an actor and a film director. [For] a few years he [has been] running a wonderful music series in Sedona where Qian has played before. So we know each other very well.”
Cannelakis is a Curtis Institute of Music and New England Conservatory graduate and an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The day after the Aspect concert, his new CD with his regular duo partner Michael Stephen Brown, entitled (b)romance, will be released, and then promoted with duo concerts around the country. He has also produced, directed, and starred in short films and music videos, including the web series “Conversations with Nick Canellakis.” His latest short film, My New Cello, will be screened at the Conquest Film Festival in California.
Back to School?
Some of the musical “conversations” on the March 14 Aspect Chamber Music Series program will have particular meaning for the musicians. Sitkovetsky and Qian, for example, “have a special bond with the Beethoven and the Smetana because both of these pieces were part of important milestones for both of us. The Beethoven we performed a long time ago in an important audition together when both of us were 15 years old and studying in the UK. This audition gave us our first recital at the Wigmore Hall which was very magical.
“And the Smetana is a piece that we have also played with our trio, The Sitkovetsky Piano Trio, almost since our formation as a group. We had great success with it early on including in competitions and many important debuts. It has been a while since we have played it so it will be very nice to come back to it for this concert.”
More Information and Tickets:
- Thursday Feb. 8, 7:30 pm: “Love’s Sickness” at the Blue Gallery, 222 E. 46 St., NYC.
- Thursday March 14, 7:30 pm: “From My Life” at Bohemian National Hall, 321 E. 73 St., NYC.
