BPMMS Concert

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Courtly Music from Paris and London in the 17th and 18th Century at South Church in April

By Laura Mazza-Dixon

The Bruce Porter Memorial Music Series will conclude the 2014-15 Season with a concert of Baroque Music from 17th and 18th Century Paris and London performed on Sunday April 26, at 4 p.m. in the sanctuary of South Congregational Church.

The concert is free and open to the public. A suggested donation of $10 may be made at the door to support the continuation of the series. The church is wheelchair accessible.

The Baroque Trio, Les Amies de Théodore, with Susan Allen on flute, Laura Mazza-Dixon on viola da gamba and Anne Mayo on harpsichord, will be joined by guest artist Douglas Johnson on violin and viola for the Troisième Concert from François Couperin’s Concerts Royaux, written for the court of King Louis XIV.  They will also perform the Paris Quartett in g minor by Georg Phillippe Telemann, a colleague of J.S. Bach, who visited Paris in 1730. Telemann wrote in a letter to a friend that these pieces in the French style “won the attention of the ears of the court and the town, and procured for me in a very little time an almost universal renown and increased esteem.”

Guest artists Sudie Marcuse-Blatz, soprano, and Nancy Curran, harpsichord, will join Laura Mazza-Dixon and Douglas Johnson in a performance of Joseph de Bodin Boismortier’s cantata Diane et Actéon. The myth of Diane and Actéon is drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but in this cantata the familiar story is given an unexpected twist. Actéon and his hunting party surprise Diana while she is bathing, and the furious goddess turns the hero into a stag, to be torn apart by his own hounds.

Sudie Marcuse-Blatz will also perform three songs by English composer Henry Purcell, whose music for the London stage was the precursor the the Handel Oratorios and Operas of the 18th century.