Enchantment and Passion — A Musical Journey from Purcell to Debussy

About the Event

Inside the welcoming stone walls of St. Andrew's Church of Scotland, music lovers are invited to pause their travels and enter a world of elegance, drama, and dreamlike beauty. Enchantment and Passion — A Musical Journey from Purcell to Debussy (Incanto e Passione — Un viaggio musicale da Purcell a Debussy) traces an expressive path across Europe, from the theatrical intensity of Henry Purcell's “Dido's Lament” and Antonio Vivaldi's “Vedrò con mio diletto” to the refined colours of Claude Debussy's “Clair de Lune” and Gabriel Fauré's “Après un rêve.”

Notes on the Violoncello da Spalla
“Between the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century, the violoncello da spalla was a popular instrument among violinists, if only because of the wide range of possibilities it offered them.
They used it to play the bass line, accompaniments, and even obbligato solo parts. Composers wrote sonatas and concertos for this instrument or that could be played on it, and it was widely used as an obbligato instrument in arias from church or chamber cantatas.
Cellists and violinists from northern Italy traveled throughout Europe. In Catalonia, Caldara, Bononcini, and Dall’Abaco left their mark. Diana Roche, a violinist, principal cellist, and researcher from Barcelona, is conducting research on a vast body of church cantatas by Catalan composers who regularly employed the small five‐string cello in solo and obbligato parts between the late 17th and mid‐18th centuries.
We still have in museums some instruments very similar to the shoulder cello we use today. Those built by Johann Christian Hoffman, a friend and luthier of Johann Sebastian Bach, are merely the most famous and relevant examples. We know of five such instruments: unfortunately, two were lost during the war. Of those still in existence, one is in Leipzig, one in Brussels, and one in Berkeley. One of these five appears in the inventory following the death of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, and another was owned by the Thomaskantor until World War II.