Summer Festival Success

 The 2011 BONJ Summer Music Festival was filled with energy, beauty and the great music associated with Maestro Robert W. Butts and The Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey. There was magic in the air from the opening orchestra notes to the final operatic chorus. What better way to talk about the opening concert than to reprint the wonderful review written by Sheila Abrams, NJ Arts Maven, August 16, 2011:

“There’s a lot to love about the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey. For one thing, the Madison-based ensemble is likely to give audiences the opportunity to hear music they have rarely or never heard before. And for another, conductor Robert Butts is fond of featuring orchestra members as soloists in performances. Both of these traits were evident as the group kicked off its annual week-long summer music festival with a concert on Sunday, Aug. 14, in Dolan Hall on the campus of the College of St. Elizabeth in Convent Station. The program featured works by three little-known composers, along with an exquisite vocal piece by Johann Sebastian Bach and the dazzling Piano Concerto No. 1 by Felix Mendelssohn.

The variety of the program reflected Butts’s wide-ranging musical tastes—he once was a country and western singer—as well as his passion for teaching. He began with an overture to a ballet, L’Amant Anonyme, by Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint George, a composer who, during the second half of the 18th century, was one of the most influential musicians in Paris. The child of a black mother and a white father, Saint George was known as The Black Mozart as well, Butts said, as The Black Don Juan. The overture was a delight, airy, melodic and beautifully structured. As with the all the best music of the classical period, the piece has an inevitability about it, as if it was meant to be in its exact form.
The second piece on the program featured the virtuosity of two stalwart members of the orchestra’s violin section: Allen Weakland and concertmaster Agnes Kwasniewska. They joined the orchestra in the Concerto Concertant, a piece by Josef Reicha, a little-known Czech composer of the classical period. Himself an accomplished violinist, Reicha’s composition featured virtuosic elements for the two soloists, who discovered the piece during a recent visit to Poland.
The first part of the program ended with a piece that, from a programming point of view, was surprising in the setting of an orchestral concert: the J.S. Bach cantata, Jauchzett Gott in Allen Landen (Praise God in All Lands), written for soprano and solo trumpet along with some orchestral instruments. The soloists were Maria Alu, soprano, and Michael Bassett, trumpet. A stunning piece, giving the soprano a range of spectacular melismatic runs, it also allows for similar fireworks for the trumpet, that interacts with the voice in a way only a genius like Bach could have conceived. Alu, who performed Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate in the Baroque Orchestra’s spring concert a few months ago, is an artist whose joy in the music reaches her audiences.
The second half of the concert moved into the 19th century and once again with a little-known composer: Franz Doppler. And once more, two members of the orchestra were given the opportunity to shine: flautists Margaret Walker and Catherine Barlow Garrison were featured in Doppler’s Andante and Rondo. The break from the classical music of the 18th century to the romantic music of the 19th was evident from the beginning. Doppler was himself a flute virtuoso. He and his younger brother frequently performed flute duets of his composition and it is likely the Andante and Rondo were composed for such a performance. Lyrical and lushly romantic, the piece was a perfect way to demonstrate how music changed in the 19th century. Doppler was also known as a composer of operas and ballets.
While it would be misleading to say that the concert was leading up to a climax, the final piece was spectacular enough to suggest that. It featured Vincent Ip, a 19-year-old pianist from Montclair, who was this year’s first place winner of BONJ’s Pearl and Julius Young Rising Stars Music Composition. One of Ip’s prizes was the opportunity to play one movement of a concerto of his choice with the orchestra. Maestro Butts related that the pianist asked if he could instead play the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 in its entirety. The performance of this brilliantly melodic and virtuosic work brought the audience to its feet, as Ip’s youthful effervescence erupted spectacularly in the final presto movement. An outstanding ending to a wonderful concert!”

Monday to Friday, fabulous music filled Grace Church as Anne Matlack put together a week of exquisite keyboard recitals featuring Eric Stroud, Jim Little, Brian Harlow, and John Pivarnik. Matlack herself presented a charming program to conclude the series, featuring several young artists narrating and performing in a concert attended by many appreciative families! Local scholar, poet and philosopher Jabez van Cleef presented his annual intellectually challenging discussion on Wednesday evening. He delved into the Don Juan legend, focusing around Lord Byron’s famed poem in a talk entitled I Want a Hero.
Summer 2011 will probably be best remembered as a summer with some pretty wild weather. Friday’s chamber music concert had to be postponed due to severe thunderstorms that rocked the area and caused power outages. Several musicians, led by pianist Ron Levy performed an impromptu recital for those who braved the elements. The concert will be rescheduled in the near future!
Saturday night was a unique evening as BONJ presented its first contemporary music evening. Chamber music compositions by Anthony Bevilacqua, Andrew Pecota and Robert W. Butts provided the first hour’s entertainment. Each composer’s personal style was clearly evident in the trio, duo, quartet and quintet ensembles. The second half was the first staged production of the music drama Gesualdo, featuring a book by Jewel Seehaus-Fisher and songs by Robert W. Butts, the tragic love story based on the true life 1593 marriage of Carlo Gesualdo and Leonora d’Este. The music was expressively performed and the characters brought fully to life by Emily Thompson Schweer, Brian Jamieson, Alexandra Altonjy and Dom Giambattista.
The festival concluded with a production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. To close, we’d like to quote from the review of the opera by Sheila Abrams, NJ Arts Maven, August 23, 2011:
“If Mozart’s Don Giovanni went by its original name, Il dissoluto punito, (the rake punished), it would give away the whole thing. The opera, thought by some to be Mozart’s greatest, spends three hours convincing the audience that the title character is a scoundrel. He doesn’t reap his just desserts until the end. And we must say that he does it in a spectacular way. On August 21, the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey ended its week-long summer festival with a semi-staged concert version of the opera in Dolan Hall on the campus of The College of Saint Elizabeth in Convent Station. And it was done very well indeed. The orchestra was on stage, with the singers performing in front of them. The singers, however, were in costume, had the use of some rudimentary props and acted out the plot as it evolved. Helping the audience to understand what was going on were libretti translated into English, distributed to audience members with their programs.
Interestingly, Mozart called Don Giovanni a comic opera. Considering that within minutes of the opening, the handsome Don is introduced by the screams of Donna Anna, the latest victim of his “seduction,” we’re not sure that comic is a good description. The fact that she is screaming would suggest something more aggressive than what we think of as seduction. Moreover, minutes later, the Don kills Donna Anna’s father, the Commendatore, in a duel. The glittering overture was reportedly composed by Mozart at the very last minute, in time for the 1787 premiere in Prague. T

he first aria, Notte e giorno faticar, is sung by Leporello, the Don’s faithful servant. The resounding bass voice of Hyong Sik Jo in the role set the standard for the rest of the singers. The killing of the Commendatore sets off the plot. Donna Anna and her betrothed, Don Ottavio, vow vengeance and begin a pursuit of the elusive villain. It makes little sense to follow the story because, despite the mixture of comedy and melodrama, the plot is secondary to the music. And the music is gorgeous.
It is difficult to say which of the three sopranos with featured roles was the most spectacular. Karole Lewis was a fine Donna Anna, and Tonia Manteneri was lovely as Donna Elvira, another victim of the Don’s love-‘em-and-leave-‘em philosophy. Perhaps most impressive, though, was the petite Jacqueline Leiva, a small woman with a big voice, as Zerlina, a peasant girl. Her duet with the Don as he tries to entrap her, “La ci darem la mano,” was simply glorious.
The men in the cast were equally impressive. Kevin Peters, the only tenor, was a wonderful Don Ottavio, and Illya Roitman as Masetto, the peasant betrothed to Zerlina, was impressive. Mozart made the Don the only baritone in the cast, and that role was ably sung in this production by Robert Prowse. Also a gifted actor, he was convincing as a man whose appetites supersede any moral imperative. Despite his beautiful voice and good looks, he came across as self-absorbed and ruthless. The ending of the story, though, is strange and unexpected. It is a supernatural hand that extracts vengeance. When the Don mocks the gravestone statue of his victim, the Commendatore, (beautifully played and sung by Don Sheasley), the statue comes spookily alive and ultimately releases demons that drag the Don to hell. An unforgettable ending!    The orchestra, under the baton of Maestro Robert Butts, was the foundation of the work.”