By Sheila Abrams
On Sunday afternoon, the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey charmed a full house of music lovers in Hackettstown. The tiny Little Theatre on the campus of Centenary College hosted a northwest Garden State audience pretty much starved for live classical music.
It was also the first appearance so far west in the state for the Madison-based orchestra, which, despite its name, is better described by the title of its newsletter, Baroque and Beyond. The concert began with Baroque music and then went far beyond, into this century, playing a Concerto for Bassoon, composed by conductor Maestro Robert W. Butts.
Probably guided by the size limitations of the Little Theatre (which was the home of the Centenary Stage Co. before the college opened the state-of-the-art Lackland Center for the Performing Arts elsewhere on the campus), BONJ came with a scaled-down version of the orchestra, which is usually made up of about 40 musicians. With music stands, chairs, and room for the conductor and soloists, 16 musicians pushed the limits of the miniscule stage, but the program was well-suited to the abbreviated ensemble.
The program opened with the delightfully melodic Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, by Georg Friderich Handel. One of the most popular pieces by Handel, this charming work is a sinfonia that opens the third act of the oratorio, Solomon, composed in 1748 and premiered in London the following year.
It was a perfect lead-in to a longer baroque piece, a Concerto for Oboe, by the lesser-known Baroque composer, Tomaso Albinoni, a contemporary and friend of Antonio Vivaldi. Born in Venice, Albinoni was known in his time for a prolific output of operas, which are virtually never performed today. However, he is better known for his orchestral music and may have been the first Italian composer to employ the oboe as a solo instrument.
Elizabeth Engelberth was the oboe soloist. It’s characteristic of Maestro Butts to give a member of the orchestra the opportunity to play as a soloist, and he did so in this instance, to great success. The piece, in three movements, enabled Engelberth to demonstrate her light and precise touch on this lovely woodwind.
With the next piece, the orchestra ventured beyond Baroque, into the classical period some 50 years later, with Mozart’s Symphony No. 20, composed, astonishingly, when the prodigy was all of 16! The music reflects the youthful energy of the composer, featuring trumpets along with the woodwinds.
The second half of the program was, as Butts promised, “something completely different.” It began with a very short Bourée by J.S. Bach, which took the audience so much by surprise that they neglected to applaud – not because there was anything wrong with it but because they didn’t know it was over!
The orchestra then moved on to the Concerto for Bassoon, by Maestro Butts, played by Andrew Pecota, the extremely gifted bassoonist with the orchestra. Pecota had earlier played a lupophon, a recently invented, very large woodwind instrument which may be the only one of its kind in North America and possibly the Western Hemisphere! (You never know what you may see at a BONJ concert.)
The bassoon, like its higher-pitched cousin, the oboe, is a gorgeous instrument that rarely gets the attention it deserves. This was a great opportunity to hear the dark, deep velvet tones of this large instrument which is wonderful even just to look at.
The solo instrument in the concerto weaves a path through the listener’s consciousness like the steady flow of a river. The orchestra seems to provide the landscape through which the river flows. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, occasionally reaching greater depth or bubbling on the surface, the river of the bassoon proceeds.
It’s a lovely work. Butts, we are glad to say, does not resort to the cheap trick employed by some modern composers who seek shock audiences with the intentional harshness of their music. This concerto actually reflects the effervescent personality of its composer. It’s always great news to music lovers to learn there IS beautiful music being composed. (And by the way, next Sunday afternoon, BONJ will premiere a piano concerto by Paul Ziegler, who will be the soloist. The venue is Dolan Hall at the College of St. Elizabeth in Madison.)
The concert ended with another total change of mood, type of music and period. Two singers, soprano Tonia Monteneri and tenor Peter Lewis, joined the orchestra to present selections from Puccini’s La Boheme and Verdi’s La Traviata. BONJ has recently ventured into opera in a big way, and even more is promised. The audience responded with a standing ovation, bringing the singers back for an encore of the famous drinking song, Libbiamo from La Traviata. We look forward to a return visit by this group to the wilds of northwest New Jersey. And to the Madison concert next week.
