Wed 7/14
Apollo’s Fire closed out its 30th anniversary season with a performance in the picturesque Bud and Susie Rogers Garden at the Akron Art Museum.
Jeannette Sorrell (creative director, conductor and harpsichordist) asked her eager audience to imagine that they were attending an al fresco concert at a coffee garden in Leipzig on a summer evening in the 1730s where Johann Sebastian Bach often featured his own work and the popular music of his friends and peers George Phillipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi.
The audience was packed with people enjoying the late summer sunset and opportunity to enjoy this phenomenal orchestra, without constraint, after a difficult year of pandemic cancelations around the world. Indeed, the energy that the performers and an exuberant Ms. Sorrell exude seemed to ignite the audience into an almost worshipful frenzy.
The globally renowned ensemble opened this magnificent concert with Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto Polonois in G TWV 43:G7. The musicians leapt from Telemann into a beautiful rendition of Nicola Porpora’s Alto Giove (from the opera Polifemo) arranged by Sorrell, who is recognized internationally as one of today’s most eloquent and influential interpreters of classical Baroque music.
In addition to Ms. Sorrell’s extraordinary conducting and harpsichord performance, she is a spellbinding raconteur who joyfully led her performers and audience into three consecutive pieces by Antonio Vivaldi,Ciaccona in C Major, RV. 114, (also arranged by Sorrell) and performed with ebullience and superlative mastery by violinists Alan Choo and Holly Piccoli; Concerto in B Minor for Four Violins, RV 580, featuring violinists, Choo, Oliver Brault, Emi Tanabe and Andrew Fouts; and Concerto in A Minor for Two Violins, RV522, also featuring Brault and Choo on violin.
Perhaps the most laudable piece of the stupendous evening was composed by J. S. Bach himself. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no.4 in G Major, BWV 1049 featured Oliver Brault on violin and Daphna Mor and Kathie Stewart, who performed with lavishness on recorder.
The program was performed without an intermission due to COVID concerns, but the already besotted audience was sent home with a love letter in the form of a rousing Turkish encore again featuring Daphne Mor.