Viola da Gamba Featured Double-Header Concert

Quaver presents: Hiding and Seeking
As with all quaver programs, this presents a wide range of music rarely heard side by side. Some come from the core consort repertoire that gambists know and love.  And much of it is music originally for other instruments - from voices and keyboards to orchestras, Hawaiian slide guitar, and more.  What unifies the program is a theme of hiding and seeking, whether it’s finding the complex fugue theme that’s passed around all the parts, or seeking a haunting melody to find comfort in loss.

Wildcat Viols presents: The Magnifick Consort of Four Parts
Roger North’s sobriquet “a magnifick consort of four parts,” refers to Locke’s suites, but could aptly describe each of these composers’ viol quartets. For Locke, Purcell, and Legrenzi alike, these are rare and exquisite products of exceptional circumstances. Locke’s suites, heirs to the fantasy-suite genre innovated and developed by Coperario, Lawes, and Jenkins, date from a politically turbulent time in which viols were all but eliminated from the public sphere, but irrepressibly flourished in private household settings. Purcell’s Fantazias, are of mysterious origin, written during the summer of his 21st year, decades after the consort fantasy had fallen out of fashion; possibly the product of a self-directed course of compositional study, it is nevertheless hard to believe that works of such emotional deptch and subtlety were not meant to be played and enjoyed. Legrenzi’s sonatas for “quattro viole da gamba…”, published long after the viol had vanished from the Italian musical mainstream, were likely composed for the orphaned girls of Venice’s Ospedale dei Mendicanti to play on their new set of viols, purchased the same year as the sonatas’ publication (1673).