United States Numerous, ‘Wild Issues’: Les Délices: Elena Mullins Bailey (soprano), Deborah Nagy (oboe and recorder), Shelby Yamin (violin), Rebecca Landell (cello), Mark Edwards (harpsichord). Christ Church Episcopal, Hudson, 23.11.2025. (MSJ)
Telemann – Don Quichotte (choices); ‘Napolitana’; ‘Xantippe’
Couperin – ‘Rondemont’ from Apothéose de Lully; ‘Le Rossignol en Amour’
Biber – Sonata Representativa
John Walsh (arr. Nagy) – Suite from Hen Fancyer’s Delight
Louis-Claude Daquin – ‘Le Coucou’
Arne – ‘The place the Bee Sucks’
Texts of Aesop’s Fables set to French dance music of the 1730s (trans. Larry Rosenwald)
One of the vital attention-grabbing traits of the state of Ohio is how one can journey in slightly over an hour from cities settled by folks from the southern colony of Virginia as much as the Western Reserve, a nook of the state that had been claimed by the colony of Connecticut and was subsequently populated by settlers from New England. This presence remains to be felt within the structure of the realm and in its cultural growth. Music from the Western Reserve is a live performance sequence positioned within the picturesque village of Hudson, a city that appears extra like a quaint New England settlement than an Ohio farm city. The sequence is at present in its forty-second season.
Les Délices is a baroque chamber group began by Deborah Nagy in 2009. Nagy is acquainted to many from her involvement in Apollo’s Fireplace, the excellent Cleveland baroque orchestra, and he or she brings the identical enterprising sense of exploration to Les Délices (which has toured nationally to acclaim). This system offered on this event was ‘Wild Issues’, a precursor to a multi-season venture that can discover fable and its influence on society. The wild issues listed here are evocations of birds, bugs and animals, united by a thread of settings of Aesop’s Fables utilizing French dances from the early 1700s because the music.
This system opened with (most of) the Don Quichotte suite by Georg Philipp Telemann, diminished by the gamers from its full string ensemble scoring for this presentation for oboe, violin, cello and harpsichord. Telemann was a German composer depicting a Spanish story by Cervantes, however he was a grasp of nationwide types, and this work is extra French than anything, with its robust sense of pictorial evocation, notably as carried out right here in versatile French type. Dropping two actions (the love music for Dulcinea and the scene of Sancho Panza getting tossed in a blanket) helped focus the suite on the animal depictions: Don Quixote’s horse and Sancho Panza’s donkey, their unruly cost towards windmills and the Don’s goals of future conquests. Tempos have been versatile, permitting the depiction of the previous horse’s makes an attempt to realize momentum, depicted by Shelby Yamin’s violin thrives, and the donkey’s stubbornness, embodied in Rebecca Landell’s boisterous cello enjoying.
The French nature of this system emerged additional with the ‘Rondement’ from François Couperin’s Apothéose de Lully, and later in the identical composer’s ‘Le Rossignol en Amour’ from Ordre XIV of his harpsichord suites, cleverly tailored right here for Nagy’s nimble recorder to take the melodic twitters alongside the harpsichord. Nagy sat out as Yasmin plunged into the vigorous animal depictions of Heinrich Biber’s Sonata Representativa with the comedian dissonances of its frog and cat actions.
The Aesop settings have been a working thread all through the efficiency, sung with a stability of class and storytelling aptitude by Elena Mullins Bailey. The songs have been performed in skillful English translations by Larry Rosenwald, permitting prompt comprehension with out texts and translations in this system. Just a few phrases have been misplaced within the beneficiant acoustic of the church, although Bailey’s storytelling stored all of it on track. The French dance tunes have been notably enticing and labored charmingly as automobiles for the texts.
Probably the most unlikely peculiarity of this system was a set from the e-book Hen Fancyer’s Delight, a 1708 publication by John Walsh that isn’t a musical rating in any respect. Moderately, it’s a e-book with recorder melodies that the person was instructed to play to a pet hen, in hopes of educating the hen to whistle alongside. Nagy tailored the tunes to her ensemble, opening with Yamin’s violin ‘educating’ her recorder one of many melodies.
After a pair extra choices from Telemann, together with considered one of his evocations of the shrewish spouse Xantippe (a unique kind of wild factor!), harpsichordist Mark Edwards had a solo second with a flexibly French efficiency of Louis-Claude Daquin’s ‘Le Coucou’. Usually carried out in a inflexible, metronomic method, the layered evocation of the decision of the cuckoo stays charming when given with the sort of flexibility that permits its ornamental parts to be savored. Edwards additionally began every couplet as written with out added connective tissue, as is so usually heard in fashionable variations.
Earlier than a closing fable, Thomas Arne’s setting of Shakespeare’s ‘The place the Bee Sucks’ from The Tempest was heard. Amusingly, Arne’s textual content bowdlerized the tune to ‘the place the bee sucks, there lurk I’ as a substitute of the unique (and far racier) ‘the place the bee sucks, there suck I’. Nonetheless, it was a welcome likelihood to listen to one thing aside from Arne’s best hit, ‘Rule Britannia!’, and it match effectively with the entertaining program.
Music from the Western Reserve will return 23 February 2026 with an all-Rachmaninoff program from cellist Brendon Phelps and pianist Alexandre Marr.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
