The German Classics

This week on Arizona Encore brings us the German classics, sometimes with an Italian accent or English splendor.

Georg Frideric Handel celebrated the accession to the English throne of his German compatriots the Hanover dynasty with music of praise. One such piece was his Te Deum of 1714 known today after Princess (later Queen) Caroline. The style couldn’t be mistaken for anything but English, besides being sung in that language by soloists Kim Leeds, Patrick Muehleise, and Edward Vogal, all led by Eric Holtan with True Concord.

More Handel is shared at the Shrine of the Ages during the Grand Canyon Music Festival. Three cellists, Brook Speltz, Jacob Fowler, and David Speltz play an excerpt from the Op.3/5 concerto grosso.

Another composer is represented twice in his most introspective mood, Robert Schumann. This quintessential romantic looked to the expansive dark forests of his native land for inspiration in his Waldszenen, Op.82, a set of miniatures. One of them, Vogel als Prophet (Prophetic Bird), is quizzically eerie and we have an arrangement for saxophone that gives the bird a distinct timbre. Christopher and Hannah Creviston perform from ASU’s Katzin Concert Hall.

Schumann’s last concerto was for violin; it was long neglected in the shadow of the composer’s final mental illness and for the music’s unconventional lines. Nonetheless, soloist Yehudi Menuhin loved the concerto and transcribed the slow movement for piano trio which we hear from Trio Combray at the Grand Canyon Music Festival.

The repeated attempts by Beethoven to write both an opera and the overture for it resulted in a small trove of purely orchestral music. The Leonore Overture No.3, a wonderful microcosm of the opera’s rescue-themed plot, is usually played on its own in concerts. The Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra is led by Jeffery Meyer.

While Bach was known for texturally dense music, he had admiration for his often lighter Italian colleagues. One such example was his transcription (BWV 974) of a concerto by Alessandro Marcello, a Venetian of bewildering accomplishments both in the law and the arts. Zhu Wang plays at the Tempe Center for the Arts.