Instruments of the past will be heard, and seen, at Grounds For Sculpture
By Susan Van Dongen
From the Princeton Packet
Allow us to introduce you to a few of the ancestors of contemporary orchestral instruments.
Consider the sackbut or sacbut, an early form of the trombone used in music from the Renaissance era; or the shawm, a Medieval/Renaissance double reed wind instrument — the ancestor of the oboe. Then there’s the viol or viola da gamba, an elder of the cello, and the unusually shaped crumhorn, which may be the great-grandparent of the clarinet.
At Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton on Oct. 16, you can see and hear these instruments, and experience the sometimes merry, sometimes plaintive sounds of music from the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and American Colonial eras, when the Guild for Early Music presents its 12th annual festival, titled “The Zodiac and the Night Sky.”
Performances by regional ensembles will include vocal and instrumental music from all of these historic eras, all afternoon on the 16th, on two stages in the East and West galleries in the Seward Johnson Center for the Arts at GFS.
In addition, there will be an instrumental “petting zoo,” open to all ages in the adjacent auditorium, where visitors can get close to these curious but melodious instruments. Weather permitting, there will also be strolling performers throughout the grounds and gardens, and GFS docents will be on hand to guide visitors to sculpture that pertains to the zodiac.
Festival hours are 12:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and the afternoon of music will be launched with a lecture-demonstration of early music performance presented by Lewis Baratz, host of radio WWFM’s “Well Tempered Baroque” program.
The opening festivities also will include a concert by the Princeton-based Stretto Youth Chamber Orchestra.
“We always have a youth ensemble to kick off the festival, and this year it’s Stretto, conducted by Sherri Anderson, and they’ll do three fantasias arranged for string orchestra,” says Janet Palumbo, harpsichordist, longtime board member for the Guild, as well as artistic director and founding member of the Princeton-based chamber ensemble Le Triomphe de l’amour. “We really like having one of the area youth ensembles to perform, and we ask a different one every year.
“They’ll start at 1 p.m., and they will be the only ones to perform, but after that, we’ll have two stages (of music) going, so people can choose where to watch, listen to a little of this and that.” Ms. Palumbo says. “There’s a total of more than a dozen ensembles performing, and all members and ensembles are from the Guild, so they are either from New Jersey or from neighboring Bucks County in Pennsylvania.
“One of the interesting things about us is that some of the groups are professional, some are semi-professional, and some are amateurs, which is really unusual,” she adds.
Visitors can hear the Chamber Chorus of Princeton Pro Musica play music by Claudio Monteverdi, or the instrumental group the Gloria Consort, who will present sonatas by Johann Pepusch and Jean-Baptiste Loeillet.
Engelchor is combining forces with La Spirita to perform music from the 15th -century court of Burgundy — known for prolific composers such as Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois.
“That combination makes for a larger number of musicians involved in Medieval and Renaissance music,” Ms. Palumbo says. “So, you’ll hear the combination of recorders and viols, as well as voice and percussion.”
The a cappella vocal chamber group Mostly Motets will be playing music from the Renaissance with text about stars and the night sky, to go with the festival’s theme.
La Fiocco will be performing cantatas by Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Bononcini, for instrumental ensemble and countertenors, the highest male adult singing voice, known for its upper range as well as pure tone. There will be two countertenors in concert, in fact, which Ms. Palumbo says is uncommon.
Her own ensemble, Le Triomphe de l’amour, will feature harpsichord sonatas by both W.A. Mozart and Charles Burney for “four hands” or two performers. Ms. Palumbo will be joined by harpsichordist Minju Lee, who will also appear with Les Agrements de musique, playing Marin Marais’ “Music of the Zodiac.”
The group Musica Dolce — an outreach ensemble of the Highland Park Recorder Society — will bring an international flavor to the festival, when its presents Spanish Baroque music, as well as pieces by a British composer who lived in India and incorporated elements of Bengali music in his works. Spectra Musica, a group known for its instrumentation of Renaissance recorders, viol, and harpsichord, will also be spotlighted.
Visitors can also choose to hear the Practitioners of Musick performing music by George Frideric Handel and other composers of the English Baroque period, as well as the Radiance Chamber Ensemble, doing instrumental excerpts from Henry Purcell’s opera, “The Fairy-Queen.”
A new ensemble, Riverview Early Music, founded by lutenist John Orluk Lacombe, has been invited to be a part of the Early Music Festival, and it is unusual in that the group is focused on plucked string instruments, such as the lute, the cittern, and the Baroque guitar.
Ms. Palumbo says that, over the years, the festivals have grown tremendously, with large and enthusiastic audiences coming to the event. In addition to the music that flavors the autumn air, the Guild for Early Music Festival is “… a giant outreach project,” she says. “We try and get people interested, get people to hear things they don’t really listen to.
“We feel that every year we are introducing new people to Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music and expanding our audiences in this way,” she says. “We hope that people will like what they hear and come to other concerts throughout the year.”
The 12th Annual Festival of the Guild for Early Music will be held at the Seward Johnson Center for the Arts, Grounds For Sculpture, 80 Sculptors Way, Hamilton, Oct. 16, 12:30-5:30 p.m. Admission to the park costs $18, $15 seniors, $10 students. For more information, on the festival, go to guildforearlymusic.org. For information on Grounds For Sculpture, go to groundsforsculpture.org or call 609-586-0616.
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