Early and Period Music

It’s a bit of a shame that, with all the marketing behind Christmas, no one ever remembers – let alone observes – Advent anymore. The pre-Christmas season has a rich repertoire of music behind it that often gets ignored in favour of Messiahs, Nutcrackers and Christmas carols, but a few Toronto-based artists are mining this hard-to-market season for interesting music that will keep audiences entertained throughout the month of December.

Musicians in Ordinary have been mentioned in this column before as a group that’s known for doing interesting programs of a seasonal nature throughout the year, and I’m pleased to say they’ll be doing just that this month. On December 9 at 7:30pm, the group will bring a concert of Monteverdi, Gibbons and Byrd to St. Basil’s Church. They’ll also be joined by the Pneuma Ensemble, a new group specializing in medieval music, for some Advent tunes from 13th-century Portugal. Besides being seasonally appropriate (especially if, like many people out there, you’re already sick of hearing Christmas music by the time December rolls around), it’s a concert that won’t be done by any other groups in town any time soon. There’s scarcely any chance to hear any pre-Renaissance music in Toronto, and medieval music is hardly heard anywhere, so I’ll be very interested to hear what the Pneuma Ensemble can bring to the music scene. If you’re looking for a chamber concert in early December, the Musicians in Ordinary and Pneuma sounds like an excellent choice.

The Oratory: If you’re not particularly into medieval or chamber music, there’s another Advent-themed concert worth checking out before Christmas. The Oratory at Holy Family has a regular series of concerts of vocal and chamber music, but this December, the venue has decided to feature a soloist who is one of the music scene’s best-kept secrets. Toronto-based organist Phillip Fournier brings a distinctly Lutheran flavour to Holy Family Church on December 7 at 8pm with a solo concert that includes Buxtehude, Bach and Scheidt. Fournier is a great organist and improviser who plays Bach particularly well, and hearing him play solo is positively delightful.

For some actual Christmas music over the Christmas season, consider a few groups that are willing to explore somewhat less-played music for the holidays:

The Toronto Consort will be putting on an interesting program devoted entirely to Christmas music from the Middle Ages that will feature the work of two notable women from the period. The posthumous legacy of the German abbess, writer, composer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen has already been revived with a slew of CD recordings from the mid-90s onward. Judging from the fact that most of the albums had titles like Canticles of Ecstasy, Heavenly Revelations, and Vision, the artists and record labels were trading on the mystic aspect of Hildegard’s life as much as the music she wrote. One wonders what the undoubtedly erudite and pious 12th-century nun would make of the new age marketing of her records, but no matter. The music remains extraordinary. Less well-known than Hildegard is a later mystic and nun, Anna of Cologne, who, as a 16th-century compiler of hymns and songs from a non-cloistered community, collected songs in both Latin and Middle German by other composers, who, with some very rare exceptions, remain completely unknown to us. The result is a uniquely spiritual take on the Christmas holidays, and where other musical groups emphasize the festive side of the holidays, Hildegard’s and Anna’s music shows us a more somber side of the darkest days of the year. Check out the Consort at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, December 9 through 11.

Cantemus: Still, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to celebrate, and if you’d rather listen to a choral ensemble for a dose of holiday cheer, consider going to a concert by the Cantemus Singers in December. Their concert, “In Dulci Jubilo,” will be a lively and joyful celebration of the music of Praetorius, Hassler, Schütz and Bach. Cantemus is an a cappella group devoted to Renaissance madrigals and chansons, and they will do a fine job with repertoire that’s upbeat and festive. Catch them in two performances, at the Church of the Holy Trinity on December 3 at 7:30pm, and at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church on December 4 at 3pm.

Haydn Operatic Gem in Concert: Among the Classical composers, it’s generally agreed that Mozart is the father of modern opera and Haydn the founder of the instrumental music we enjoy today. But besides composing on an exhausting schedule that included symphonies, chamber music and solo performances specifically tailored to the tastes of one Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, one of the most powerful aristocrats in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Haydn was also responsible for managing an opera troupe for the amusement of his employer. In addition to two concerts a week of instrumental music, Haydn was contractually obliged to put on a different opera every week at the Esterházy palace. And although there was no way Haydn could have composed 52 operas a year, he did manage to write about 15 (that we know of) while employed by the prince, although unfortunately, none of them are performed more than occasionally. But on February 5 at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts at 2:30pm, Opera in Concert and the Aradia Ensemble will be presenting one of these forgotten gems by the founding father of the Classical canon.

L’Isola disabitata was an opera written by Haydn in 1779 based on a libretto by Metastasio and is an excellent example of the mature style of a prolific composer whose works were just starting to circulate around Europe. Although we don’t associate Haydn with opera today, he was more than capable of writing great vocal music, and Aradia and Opera in Concert will give this work the level of excitement and interpretive insight it needs. Get to this concert if you possibly can.

Beauséjour in Belleville: Outside the city, Belleville audiences can look forward to hearing a gifted solo musician in the new year. The talented Quebecois harpsichordist Luc Beauséjour has an encyclopedic catalogue of albums behind him and will be coming to play in St. Thomas’s Church in Belleville for a pay-what-you-can concert. No word yet on the program, but Beauséjour is a veteran of solo Baroque keyboard music and a technically flawless musician. If you’re in the Belleville area, you should definitely try to make it to his show on January 15 at 4:30pm.

Taylor’s TEM: Closer to the city, countertenor Daniel Taylor has made a name for himself as a soloist and opera singer, but lately his choir and chamber music performances have been gaining both notice and acclaim. Led by Taylor, the Choir of the Theatre of Early Music is made up mainly of younger Montreal-based singers. January 21 at 8pm, St. Jude’s Celebration of the Arts presents the group in a concert of contemporary and Renaissance a cappella vocal works by some great English choral composers, including Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and John Tavener. Taylor is a gifted singer with a glorious voice who has a fine ear for young talent, and the TEM choir is an exceptional group of voices.

David Podgorski is a Toronto-based harpsichordist, music teacher and a founding member of Rezonance. He can be contacted at earlymusic@thewholenote.com.

Some people can do just about anything they put their minds to, and Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova is certainly one of these. After starting a career playing modern violin in the outskirts of Moscow during the Soviet era and serving up a steady diet of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Mullova decided to add historically informed perfomance practice to an already impressive skill set and completed the transition with an album of Beethoven and Mendelssohn violin concertos with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in 2003. Thirteen years later, Mullova has gone on to perform with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and with Venice Baroque, and is now a regular collaborator with Accademia Bizantina, a newer group on the European Baroque scene led by Italian harpsichordist Ottavio Dantone. The results have been impressive – Mullova has been plowing through the Bach chamber works, including the six Bach sonatas for violin and continuo, the violin concertos, and the solo sonatas and partitas – and her Vivaldi and Mozart concertos aren’t too bad either.

Ontario audiences will have ample chance this month to hear both Mullova and Dantone in both Kingston and Toronto, as the pair, along with Bizantina, will be touring an ambitious program of Bach concerti to both cities. Catch an international violin virtuoso along with a superb backing band in Kingston at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts on November 12 at 7:30pm, and in Toronto at Koerner Hall on November 13 at 3pm.

Esfahani, harpsichord virtuoso: Solo harpsichord recitals are all too rare in Canada, but with internationally reknowned Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani coming to the Isabel Bader Centre for a concert on November 20 at 2:30, Kingstonians will have a rare opportunity to hear an up-and-coming virtuoso. Esfahani is just 32 years of age, but is already proving that he can do just about anything on the keyboard, with a repertoire ranging from Byrd to Ligeti (via CPE Bach and Rameau). And he plays all these composers rather well – each of his three albums netted Esfahani a slew of awards as well as accolades from critics. His Kingston audience will have a chance to decide the level of Esfahani’s virtuosity and versatility for themselves when he shows off a program of works by Bach, Rameau and Sweelinck. Montrealers reading this may also take some small comfort in the knowledge that if they want to hear this rising star, they need not drive all the way to Kingston – Esfahani will also be playing in Montreal on November 24 and 25 with Les Violons du Roy as part of Bach Sans Frontières, with another virtuoso concert – he’ll give his Montreal audiences both the Górecki harpsichord concerto and a Bach concerto with a cadenza by Brahms.

An Italian noblewoman being shipped off to become queen of France doesn’t seem like a particularly unusual event for Renaissance Europe – unless of course that particular Italian noblewoman happens to be descended from the most notorious, corrupt and despised family of political millionaires in history. The Toronto Consort explores this in their concert program “The Italian Queen of France,” by telling the story of Caterina de’ Medici, who found herself married off to Henry II in 1549 as a means of consolidating her already powerful family’s influence throughout Europe.

Calling Caterina the Italian Queen of France is an entirely appropriate title too, as the French never forgot – or let the queen herself forget – that she was an outsider in their country. Whether this could be attributed to anti-Italian sentiment or to the extremely negative reputation of the Medici family is perhaps one of the great debates of Renaissance history, but the French must surely have known that Caterina’s cousin was the de facto tyrant of Florence who bought politicians and judges to do his bidding. There was also another cousin of Caterina’s, Giulio (aka Pope Clement VII), who was skewered in one of the most bitter political feuds of the century – he was the pope who had to tell Henry VIII of England that he couldn’t annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, as her brother was occupying Rome with an army at the time. Like the rest of her family, Caterina wasn’t particularly popular. She suffered from rumours that she was a witch with links to the occult, and the fact that she was both interested in astrology and a personal patron of Nostradamus didn’t help this at all.

Still, if there was one thing the Medicis knew how to do well, it was to bolster a bad reputation through artistic patronage and, as the theme of the concert implies, one way the queen tried to counteract a negative reputation was through lavish – and eventually ruinous – spending on the arts, including music. French Renaissance composer Claude Le Jeune was a particular favourite under the Italian queen and features prominently in this program; the Consort will also feature music from his contemporaries Adrian Le Roy and Guillaume Costelay. Catch their show November 11 and 12 at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre at 8pm.

Toronto Masque Theatre: Another group that’s good for at least one early-music show a year for Toronto audiences is the Toronto Masque Theatre, as they’ll demonstrate this month with performances of Handel’s Apollo e Dafne, at the historic Enoch Turner Schoolhouse on November 17 to 19. Handel was just 24 years old when he began working on this secular cantata for a Venetian concert-going public, but Venetians never got a chance to hear it. Instead, the budding opera seria master shelved it for a year and finally premiered it to a German-speaking audience in Hanover. Somewhat oddly for a Handel work, the overture has been lost, and modern perfomances typically substitute a Handel opera overture instead. No idea if Toronto Masque Theatre will do this, or indeed perform any overture at all, but the concert is a great chance to hear some rare and early (indeed, pre-opera) Handel.

Tafelmusik: And finally, while all of these concerts are worthy of our attention, let us all take a moment to appreciate the most industrious group of period musicians in Canada. I’m speaking of course of Tafelmusik, who will be presenting at least five different concert programs before the next issue of The WholeNote hits the shelves: “Let Us All Sing,” November 2 to 6, celebrates the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir at 35, under the baton of Ivars Taurins. Members of the ensemble make visits to Western University’s Don Wright Faculty of Music November 18 and 24. “Close Encounters…,” an intimate new (and almost completely sold-out) series features “Close Encounters…of the Italian Kind,” November 25 and December 3. Finally, “A Grand Tour of Italy,” with the full Tafelmusik orchestra, December 1 to 4 and again December 6, will be conducted by Rodolfo Richter, violinist of the acclaimed early music group, Palladian Ensemble. Richter, who opened Tafelmusik’s 2015/2016 season, is becoming something of a regular; he will be back in March 2017 for “The Baroque Diva” with Karina Gauvin.

I’m not sure what has motivated what must be close to a record-breaking run of artistic output for an already prolific group, but Toronto and area audiences will have a slew of concerts to choose from in the next few weeks. Among them, one particular show this month stands out for me: “Haus Musik: Underground Elysium” is an attempt to de-formalize classical music and help it appeal to a younger audience. At 8pm on November 24, Tafelmusik will be taking over The Great Hall on Queen W. at Dovercourt, in a program that includes Marini, Purcell and Pachelbel. It’s the second season for Haus Musik, brainchild of new managing director William Norris, and is a step forward for the ensemble, offering a new way to enjoy old music. It’s  well worth coming out to see. Concert halls don’t seem to appeal to a generation that, with iPods and music streaming approaching their third decade, is determined to consume culture on its own terms. If enough young people go out to this show and end up liking it, Tafelmusik will have secured a future audience for classical music – and will be the number one group in the minds of new listeners.

QUICK PICKS

Nov 19: Scaramella presents “Mysteries: Joyful and Sorrowful,” works composed for the imperial chapels and courts of the Habsburg Empire by Schmelzer, Biber, Froberger and their 17th-century contemporaries performed by Ingrid Matthews, baroque violin; Joëlle Morton, bass viol; Matthew Girolami, G violone; Sara-Anne Churchill, harpsichord/organ at Victoria College Chapel.

Nov 30: Alison Melville, traverso/ recorders/ kantele and Julia Seager-Scott, clarsach/triple harp present “Border Crossings,” including works by James Oswald, Turlough O’Carolan, Corelli and Vivaldi, at Heliconian Hall.

David Podgorski is a Toronto-based harpsichordist, music teacher and a founding member of Rezonance. He can be contacted at earlymusic@thewholenote.com.

Before George Frideric Handel was hired by King George III, England was in some aspects a cultural backwater, at least as far as music was concerned. The main problem was a lack of patrons. The English court couldn’t spend as lavishly on entertainment on the same scale as, say, Versailles under Louis XIV or Vienna under Leopold I, and the Church of England didn’t exactly have much of a budget either. England was, unfortunately, a musically dull country, but encouraging culture was considered both a worthwhile political goal and a civic duty by liberally minded politicians around the turn of the 18th century.

For similar reasons, there was a push in England to both foster a native opera scene and build a national opera house in London – an ambitious project in an age when opera was still less than a century old, and far from the accepted musical institution that it is today. And opera has always been a hard sell for people not already inclined towards music or unwilling to accept the idea of a sung drama. While Italy and countries with an Italian influence on their culture embraced the opera readily, the English in particular didn’t warm to it. Italian opera had been performed in England in 1674; an early 18th-century writer, Colley Cibber, was still protesting that opera was “not a plant of our native growth, nor what our plainer appetites are fond of, and is of so delicate a nature that without excessive charge it cannot live long among us.”

But that didn’t stop the most ardent English opera devotees from trying to popularize opera. They successfully had an opera house – the Queen’s Theatre – built in London in 1705, by enlisting several like-minded (and wealthy) patrons and pre-selling subscriptions. And they commissioned an opera with an English libretto. There was just one problem. After rehearsals had started, the backers realized that the opera (Semele, by John Eccles) wasn’t very good. Changing their plans on the fly, they decided instead to make the debut performance at the new opera house the even more forgettable Gli amori di Ergasto, by Jakob Greber.

The result was a disaster. For one thing, it was sung in Italian, which few audience members could understand, by Venetian singers who, at least one audience member complained, were “the worst that e’re came from thence.” As a national cultural project, it was also a failure. The national ambitions of English opera also came under fire from critics, as some felt that it was a bad idea to debut a new national opera house with an Italian turkey rather than “a good new English opera.” And of course, with so much political capital riding on the success of the venture, political opponents as well as critics had been busy sharpening their knives. They were merciless, decrying the opera house and its lacklustre start as an example of hubris, and its patrons as “Creators, Givers of Being, and God Almighties.” The fact that the opera was in Italian was a particular problem for the audiences of the day, and an easy target for satirists, who predicted that future historians would be misled into thinking that average 18th-century Londoners understood Italian fluently.

With so much jingoistic sentiment lurking in the background, a distinctly anti-opera attitude, a backwater musical community, a dearth of native musical talent, and a composer of any worth seemingly nowhere to be found, English music – and English opera – needed a hero.

Surprisingly, they may have already had one in their midst, in the form of Henry Purcell and his epic opera Dido and Aeneas. Purcell’s opera had everything the English were looking for: an all-English text and a talented composer who was able to incorporate French and Italian musical style into a music that was distinctly his own as well as sounding very typically English. Unfortunately for the Purcell opera, its subject matter (a monarch who is led astray by Satan-worshipping witches) made Dido and Aeneas, with its implied indictment of the English monarchy, too politically charged and too inflammatory to be performed in a contemporary English opera house.

Given Eccles and Greber as the only alternatives, the tragedy of lack of compositional talent on hand to give the English the opera they needed was complete – Purcell having died the previous decade.

Comeback: With Dido having been overlooked by its contemporaries, and no other English-language opera able to fill its place, it’s nice to see that it has been making a comeback in recent years. Opera Atelier in particular has chosen it to kick off their 2016/17 season, and it seems that Purcell’s overlooked masterpiece will finally get the treatment it deserves. After some 300 years, the story of an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, reads more like a foundational myth than an indictment of English royalty today. With a slew of dance numbers, airs and choruses, this is one of a very few operas that’s actually catchy. With a cast of established and rising young stars, top-tier staging and costumes, arguably the best theatre in Toronto, and one of the best opera orchestras in the world, Opera Atelier is the ideal company to be performing this opera. It’s playing this month at the Elgin Theatre from October 20 to 29. Go see it.

Music for Bloody Mary: If you’re not much of an opera fan, if you’re more inclined towards choral music, or if you just prefer Renaissance music to the Baroque, English music is once again on the menu with the Tallis Choir’s performance of Music for Bloody Mary, at St. Patrick’s Church on October 15 at 7:30pm. The Tallis Choir is being much kinder to Mary I than most historians – it’s hard to get too nostalgic over a monarch who ruled for just five years and whose main accomplishments were religious purges – but the concert is filled with some forgotten gems of the English Renaissance. Tallis’ glorious Videte Miraculum and Loquebantur Variis Linguis are the highlights here, and you can also get a rare chance to hear a John Taverner Mass and the almost never-heard composer John Sheppard. The Tallis Choir is a solid vocal group who has made Renaissance polyphony their specialty – this group is one of the best early music vocal groups in the city.

I Furiosi: Another chamber group in town that I haven’t written enough about is the great I Furiosi Baroque Ensemble. The ensemble was founded in 1999 by cellist/gambist Felix Deak, soprano Gabrielle McLaughlin and violinist Tim Haig. Deak and McLaughlin were joined soon after by violinists Julia Wedman and Aisslinn Nosky, and that core ensemble remains intact almost two decades later. This is a group that stands out for their fun, engaging thematic concerts featuring a potpourri of Baroque instrumental and vocal music (with the occasional pop tease thrown in) featuring blistering performances and spirited interpretations from a top-tier ensemble to boot.

This month on October 21 at 8pm, I Furiosi will feature music by Fux, Rameau and Lully, in a concert titled “Both Alike in Dignity” at Calvin Presbyterian Church. The group will also be joined by the Toronto’s reigning baroque bassoon virtuoso, Dominic Teresi, who is the closest thing to technically flawless I’ve ever seen in a bassoon player. Consider checking out this group if you’re a fan of chamber music.

David Podgorski is a Toronto-based harpsichordist, music teacher and a founding member of Rezonance. He can be contacted at earlymusic@thewholenote.com.

But for a few instances of momentary curiosity of a few brave, or possibly foolhardy, musicians, modern concert audiences might have never heard the sound of historical instruments at all. A great case in point is the pianist Malcolm Bilson’s discovery of historical keyboards back in 1969.

When Bilson decided to give a concert on “Mozart’s piano” the result was very nearly a disaster. “I have to admit now that I really couldn’t handle the thing at all,” Bilson said in a lecture. “I must be the least gifted person for the job: my hands are too big, and I don’t have the necessary technique such an instrument required. In trying to operate this light, precise mechanism, I really felt like an elephant in a china closet. But I kept at it all week and practised hard and after several days began to notice that I was actually playing what was on the page. Suddenly I found that I really didn’t need much pedal and that the articulative pauses actually made the music more expressive.” Concert audiences and audiophiles should certainly be grateful that Bilson persevered – he was one of the first 20th-century fortepianists, and without him it’s doubtful we’d even hear a fortepiano today.

We’re also kind of fortunate Bilson opted to try using a fortepiano in the first place – the instrument itself is something of an oddity. Even to its inventor, it couldn’t have been considered to have much potential – it was initially a research and development project for the wealthy Florentine Medici family by the Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori way back in 1700.

Cristofori fit the stereotype of the eccentric inventor quite well indeed. As if inventing a new keyboard instrument wasn’t ambitious enough by itself, Cristofori also tried making harpsichords out of ebony as well as building his own upright harpsichords from designs by other inventors. It’s not known what Cristofori’s patrons thought of the instrument, but it was likely positive, as he continued to develop his invention over the next 20 years and the technology and building of pianos spread across Europe. By the 1730s, J.S.Bach had a chance to play one and recommended the builder make changes (which out of respect for the composer’s expertise, he duly did, much to Bach’s satisfaction). Still, the harpsichord was generally regarded as the superior, or at least, the more affordable, of the two keyboard instruments until the century’s end.

In the classical era, Haydn composed for the harpsichord for most of his early career, and wouldn’t buy a fortepiano until he was in his 50s, but Mozart, being 20 years younger, would come to favour the fortepiano exclusively. Just 50 years after Haydn’s death, pianos were becoming louder, more uniform in sound and more durable – and with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, mass-produced in factories and available to a middle-class market.

Andrea Botticelli: The fortepiano revival owes much to that first adventurous concert Malcolm Bilson gave in 1969, and there’s been a steady increase in fortepiano players since, but there hasn’t been a professional fortepianist who’s called Toronto home until now. Andrea Botticelli is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto’s doctoral music program in piano performance who has decided to specialize in fortepiano and Classical repertoire. Like Bilson, Botticelli found playing a different instrument to have an almost immediate effect on her interpretation. “Playing a fortepiano was such an eye-opening experience,” Botticelli says. “All the performance issues that are such a struggle on the modern piano – texture, clarity, balance between the hands – become so much easier on the fortepiano.” According to Botticelli, all the exacting details that composers like Mozart and Schubert took such care in writing, all those little slurs, phrase markings and articulations that pianists struggle with, were actually written for the old 18th- and 19th-century instruments, and a modern Steinway can’t really negotiate the difficult terrain as easily.

“So much of what I was trying to add in terms of expression is really inherent on this instrument,” she says. “Once I really started playing the fortepiano, I wondered how I could have gone through a whole undergraduate degree without ever having heard one.” Botticelli will be making her solo debut later this month at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on September 24 at 6:15 pm, playing fantasies by Mozart, Haydn and Hummel, as well as a Mozart piano sonata.

It’s really about time there was a resident fortepianist in the GTA, and the fact that Botticelli is willing to base herself in Toronto is yet another sign that the local arts scene has grown to world-class size. There’s been a steady creep of historically inspired practice around the world since the 1970s from medieval/renaissance repertoire through the Baroque period and well into the 19th century, and professional fortepianists have been starting to pop up in major cities around the world in recent years. It’s as if an extinct species has been found again in the wild and is starting to propagate. Like audiences in London, Amsterdam and Vienna, Torontonians will now be able to hear period performances of classical and romantic keyboard music on this compelling period instrument.

Christophe Coin: There are few musicians worldwide as accomplished as Christophe Coin. A gambist, cellist and protégé of Jordi Savall since the mid-70s, Coin has gone on to record over 50 albums ranging from Gibbons’ consort music to Schumann’s cello concerto. Coin also directs the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges and is the cellist for Quatuor Mosaïques, so he’s quite adept in conventional baroque and classical repertoire. It will be exciting to see him as both musical director and soloist for Tafelmusik in their upcoming concerts October 5 to 9 at Trinity-Saint Paul’s Centre. It’s clear from this program that Coin is no slouch as a soloist – he’ll be playing both a Boccherini and a Haydn concerto – and he’ll also be leading the orchestra in symphonies by C.P.E. Bach and Dittersdorf – repertoire that both Tafelmusik and Coin excel at. If you’re at all interested in classical music, this is a concert well worth attending.

Rezonance: Finally, if you’d like to hear a chamber music concert this month, or just want to get out of the concert hall for a change, consider making it out to hear my group Rezonance Baroque play the music of J.S. Bach at the CSI coffee pub at 720 Bathurst St. (home base of The WholeNote), on September 25 at 2 pm.

After Bach settled in Leipzig as the resident music director of St. Thomas’s Church, he was left without a venue to perform any of his secular compositions or chamber works. Fortunately for the master, Gottfried Zimmermann, the owner of the local café in Leipzig, was already one of the hottest music venues in town. Rezonance will perform an all-Bach program that could have easily been heard at Zimmermann’s, including a cantata he composed for the café in honour of coffee. While it’s easy to imagine Bach as overwrought, overworked, and dependent on a caffeine fix to get through the day, this concert features exciting and whimsical repertoire that shows that the brilliant composer may have had a sense of humour after all.

David Podgorski is a Toronto-based harpsichordist, music teacher and a founding member of Rezonance. He can be contacted at earlymusic@thewholenote.com.