Hanover Baroque Trio Concert
I attended a small ensemble concert that was hosted by the music department in the fine arts building at the college, which featured an all instrumental Trio Sonata. According to the program, the music was all from the baroque period, and it was presented in a smaller room in the “chamber style.” There was not a very large audience. This kept the audience from being a distraction, so that we could really pay attention to the music.
The concert featured several instruments, but because it was a trio, only three of them played at a time. These instruments included the violin, flute, harpsichord, and organ, with either the harpsichord or the organ featured in each piece. They never played together. The harpsichord was really prominent in the works, and it was interesting because it has a totally different sound. It is very high, and the notes produced are very short.
It featured the work of eight composers, and 10 different works. Each of them were similar, in that they used a lot of short notes and big musical runs, but they also featured very different sounds. The piece that I liked best was Deuxieme Concert from Pieces de Clavecin en Concert. It made me think of animals playing in a forest, of children playing outside. It had a lot of runs featuring really fast sixteenth notes, and trills. It reminded me of the wood-nymph scene from Disney’s Fantasia.
Because of the heavy reliance on the flute and harpsichord, which are high instruments, the tones were often wispy and high, or trilling and shrill. This is really common for pieces of Baroque music. It also tends to lighten the mood people were smiling and nodding their head along to the music, engaged in just the light-heartedness of the sound.
Because there were no specifically base instruments in the trio, it lacked the depth of sound that the same pieces of music might have had in a symphony, where there are tubas and French horns, for example, to bring the sound down into a lower octave. This really changed the experience for me as a listener, because there was not the depth of sound that I am accustomed to hearing in classical, all instrumental musical pieces. It is important to point out however, that losing the lower register did not mean that every movement was airy fairy. There was another piece in particular, in the concert that had a much more sinister tone. It was more legato, and slower tempo than the first song that I liked. It also used minor keys, and chords that had unresolved clashing notes to create tension. This was a strong contrast to the other work.
Overall, I thought that the concert was really good. I specifically thought that the pieces of music selected had a wide contrast in sounds and styles especially considering that they all came from the same era and were played on just three instruments. I realized while watching that seeing a performance live is different than seeing a performance that is on video or which is recorded and gives you sound only, because it lets you respond to the body language of the other people attending the concert, and of the musicians. It was a really good experience overall.
