Wednesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured three faculty members and two students from the Schulich School’s early music programme.  It was quite a varied programme.  It started with Dario Castello’s (1602-1631) Sonate concertate in stile moderno, Prima Sonata à due soprani which is a very early example of the sonata form played here by two violins (presumably the due soprani) with harpsichord and cello continuio.  Quite interesting and very well played.  Another very esarly piece followed; Frescobaldi’s Partita sopra la Follia for solo harpsichord.  Again, unusual, interesting and very well done.

The first vocal piece on the programme was Luigi Rossi’s Lamento di Zaida mora.  It’s a pretty unusual cantata as it sets a text in which a Muslim woman bemoans the barbarism of Christians in kidnapping her lover.  Quite intense.

Two very early Handel pieces rounded out the show.  The Trio Sonata Op.2 No.5 in G Minor HVW 390 for two violins, cello and harpsichord again showed just how accomplished Handel was at even this very early stage.  It’s full of melodic invention with considerable rhythmic and harmonic sophistication.  His cantata Armida Abbandonata used all the instruments plus soprano Dominique Labelle.  It’s a long complex and dramatic.  Handel pulls out all the dramatic stops as the abandoned sorceress first conjures up the monsters of the deep to exact her revenge, then repents and calms the raging seas to spare her faithless lover.  This really is a precursor of so much of what he would do later in opera.  Fine dramatic singing and idiomatic accxompaniment again.

Dominique Labelle was supported by Dorian Bandy on baroque violin and Elizaveta Miller on harpsichord plus the two students who, excellent though they were, didn’t get a credit in the programme.

Photo credits: Karen E. Reeves