.jpg)
It has been a year of many firsts for the Winnipeg Baroque Festival, and that will continue on Thursday night as the Festival presents its first concert to feature wind instruments.
Fierbois – the duo of oboist Caitlin Broms-Jacobs and pianist Madeline Hildebrand – will be sharing a program entitled Love & Madness, with musical highlights from the French Baroque tradition with some Italian masterworks.
Even as winds take centre stage for Love & Madness, much of the music in this concert – which also features the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s principal flutist Jan Kocman and bassoonist Kathryn Brooks – was not intended for wind instruments at all.
“Baroque music has so much flexibility to it,” explains Hildebrand, highlighting that any low instrument from bassoon to cello is able to take on a bass line as it was written out at the time.
The flexibility that Hildebrand describes is also innately present in the French Baroque style, which Broms-Jacobs notes rarely gets performed in Winnipeg compared to its German and Italian counterparts. “It’s quite a different style and it’s really fun for us to explore because it is so stylistically different,” she says, highlighting the quality known as inégal where rhythms take on an unequal nature. “It’s not quite a swing, but it’s not straight, either. It gives everything a real lilt.”
Composers like Jean-Baptiste Lully, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Francois Couperin all feature this inégal style, while Italian composers like Antonio Vivaldi and Claudio Monteverdi provide something of an equal balance in the program. The latter’s aria “Pur ti miro” from his opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is a fantastic example of the concert’s title, balancing deep passion with the unbridled craziness that goes along with it. Although the aria will not be shared with words, the love aspect will come shining through as Broms-Jacobs and Kocman – life partners as well as musical partners – will perform the piece together in what will be Kocman’s final chamber music performance before his retirement after over five decades with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
“Baroque music, even though it’s very old, is very emotional and it really speaks to us now,” says Broms-Jacobs. “[It] isn’t some sort of tame, quiet thing that we should be listening [to] in our little library and behaving ourselves. Baroque music has this wild range of colours and expression.”
Hildebrand nots that those colours and expressions have already been a part of the duo’s early successes in concert and have been well-received. “For instance, one of the pieces that Caitlin and I have been performing a lot this year is the “Violin Sonata no. 2” by Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre,” she says. “We actually just performed it two nights ago in Almonte, Ontario to a big roaring success. They loved it.”
Fierbois’s Love & Madness featuring Jan Kocman and Kathryn Brooks takes the stage at Canadian Mennonite University’s Laudamus Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on April 17. Tickets and more information are available at the Winnipeg Baroque Festival’s website.