Concerto Copenhagen presents a concert program filled with elegance, drama, and musical playfulness in this intimate format.
Baroque music is anything but monotonous. In this concert program, Concerto Copenhagen unfolds the rich stylistic and emotional range that characterizes the period – from the solemn, elegant, and graceful to the exuberant, virtuosic, and refined to the, quite frankly, bizarre and experimental.
We find solemnity and elegance represented in the German-English Handel G.F. Handel. He combined Italian clarity, German counterpoint, French elegance, and English solemnity in his own unique musical language – and the sonata HWV 399 is an excellent example of this.
The exuberant and virtuoso are never far away with Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. His overture to the opera L’Olimpiade—which, as the title suggests, takes place during the Olympic Games in ancient Greece—clearly foreshadows the theatrical drama that follows.
The musical chameleon of the Baroque era was the German composer G.P. Telemann, who could masterfully adopt any of the stylistic features of the time as needed – and often played and experimented with them. The suite Les Nations depicts Europe's cultural diversity in musical form. Through stylized dances and character pieces, we are presented with portraits of different "nations" – with refined French splendor, exuberant Italian energy, and robust German gravitas, all delivered with a twinkle in the eye. In the suite La Bizarre, on the other hand, Telemann plays with musical conventions and explores – and challenges – both its boundaries and our expectations, with both humor and finesse.
A concert with equal parts grandeur, emotion, and curious musicality.