Butte Baroque Spring Concert
Saturday, March 16 at 1pm
St. John the Baptist Catholic Church
435 Chestnut Street, Chico
Our spring chamber music concert will take place on Saturday, March 16 at 1pm at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, home of the fabulous Bigelow organ, on Chestnut Street in historic downtown Chico. The program will include baroque and baroque-inspired works for strings, organ, and oboe.
Artistic Director Dr. Jeffrey Cooper will be performing on both organ and harpsichord. Additionally, concertmaster Laura Jeannin will be returning to lead our string quintet. Finally, we welcome guest oboe soloist Murray Campbell who will join us for Vivaldi's Oboe Concerto in A minor and other selections.
Spring Concert Program
Prelude and Allegro – Walter Piston
D major Praeludium from WTC2 – J.S. Bach
Keyboard Concerto no. 5 (BWV 1056) – J.S. Bach
Schwing dich auf zu deinem Gott – Ethel Smyth
G minor Praeludium – Dieterich Buxtehude
Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern – Johann Tobias Krebs
Oboe Concerto in A minor RV 463 – Antonio Vivaldi
Learn More About Walter Piston’s “Prelude and Allegro”
Walter Piston is still best known for his eponymous textbook on harmony, widely used in American music schools throughout the second half of the 20th century. His compositions make use of most of the sophisticated modernist techniques of his time, but by and large the result is surprisingly unscholastic coming from a Harvard academic. Like so many of the notable American composers of his generation, he had studied with Nadia Boulanger in France, and it is likely that he acquired something of her sensibility for polished coherence and historical rootedness as a means of balancing integrity and accessibility in modern compositions.
His wartime elegy, the Prelude and Allegro for organ and strings, was written in 1943 for the legendary Anglo-American organist E. Power Biggs. Biggs, himself something of a poster child for historical consciousness, would have appreciated the Prelude for its use of canon: a 17th/18th-century harmonic technique applied to sinewy late-19th-century melodies to produce piquant 20th-century dissonances.
—Jeffrey Cooper