Sharing Sounds on a Summer's Night

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, you couldn’t download music onto your iPod, stream it over the Internet or even buy a vinyl record. Enjoying music at home meant being able to play it on your own instrument, perhaps with friends accompanying you or just listening.

On Aug. 3, John Burkhalter and the Practitioners of Musick will perform “Delightful Companions” or “A London Entertainment” at Bristol Chapel at Westminster Choir College. The free concert will aim to capture the feel of a personal evening of music in 17th- and 18th-century London. 

Burkhalter co-founded the Practitioners of Musick with Eugene Roan, his late partner in life and music. The ensemble performs period music at historical sites and other venues. Many concerts feature rare music from the collection Burkhalter and Roan assembled over the course of many years.

“It’s a little sort of snapshot, vis-a-vis London, when it was a hub of cultural, artistic and, I suppose, intellectual activity,” Burkhalter says of the program the group will perform at Bristol Chapel. “London at this point was really kind of a place you would think of as a barometer of taste in European music and theater.”

He adds that the city was a major artistic and intellectual hub, so foreign composers seeking wider audiences for their music wanted their works published there.

“London was a really remarkable city in every respect,” says Burkhalter, who plays recorder for the Practioners of Musick. “The music that we will perform sort of shines a light on various activities of the musical world in London.”

The concert will feature works by major composers who were associated with London’s theatrical scene. Well-known composers will be heard during the performance, but so will works by lesser-known names.

“I think the prime focus of this program is to shine some light on the musical production of a number of composers whose music is perhaps not so well known, and is unjustly neglected,” Burkhalter says. “Composers who were in fact active at the end of the 17th century who were contemporaries of Henry Purcell, whose music is also to be heard on our program.”

One of those is Charles Rosier who, according to Burkhalter, was an important part of the music scene in the European lowlands, but was also popular in London. 

Burkhalter and harpsichord player Donovan Klotzbeacher will perform a Rosier sonata, the final two movements of which quote Purcell’s opera “The Fairy-Queen.”

“Anybody who played and anybody who heard this sonata in London or elsewhere and who was familiar with Henry Purcell’s music would have gotten it right away,” Burkhalter says of Rosier’s nod to Purcell’s opera. “To audience’s today, you have to explain to them why this is interesting and why this is pertinent in the 17th century.”

Also on the program are two arrangements of Handel for recorder.

“The recorder was a significant instrument in the London musical landscape,” Burkhalter says. “It was an easy instrument to comprehend, not that it wasn’t without difficulty to play, but it was an instrument that was much associated with refined amateurism.”

A popular aria in an opera was the equivalent of a modern-day hit song, so music publishers would release various arrangements of arias for different instruments with various degrees of difficulty. Handel’s publisher, therefore, had a lot to gain by releasing arrangements of his music.

“Maybe not always with Handel’s approval and whether or not Handel reaped the benefits of these arrangements remains somewhat obscure,” Burkhalter says. “But the fact of the matter is that Handel’s music became available to an increasingly large audience.”

Burkhalter’s group will perform arrangements of arias from Handel’s “Rinaldo” and “Ariodante.” A second recorder player, Sheila Fernekes, will join Burkhalter and Klotzbeacher for the “Rinaldo” aria.

“These were play-at-home arrangements in London and what we’re doing is also a series of essentially play-at-home arrangements of arias from two of Handel’s greatest operas,” Burkhalter says.

Playing music at home had great significance in the 17th and 18th centuries, as it was often a key component to socializing with friends and neighbors.

“If you bought the music and you had a harpsichord and you invited some of your friends who played the violin or the recorder or the flute or who sang, that was essentially your home entertainment unit, so to speak,” he says.

The concert will also feature a rarely performed recorder sonata by Thomas Roseingrave, an English composer who was the organist at the Church of St. George at Hanover Square, which Handel was a member of. 

“We chose the Roseingrave because his music is very quirky harmonically.” Burkhalter says. “The sonata ends, surprisingly, with a slow, lilting movement… It’s absolutely charming, it’s very undulating, very lilting and very elegant. It’s a rather reflective close on the sonata but there are some very quirky harmonic bits.”

In discussing the concert, Burkhalter talked about a neighbor of Handel’s who would listen to rehearsals of his operas, then write to her siblings about what she heard. Similarly, one evening as he and Klotzbeacher rehearsed for the Aug. 3 concert, a neighbor of Burkhalter’s stopped by with a friend to listen. Those social and cultural traditions interest Burkhalter as much as the connections music had with literature and art of its day. 

“None of this is hermetic,” he says, “it’s all linked.”

The Practitioners of Musick will perform at Bristol Chapel, 101 Walnut Lane, Princeton, on Aug. 3 at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. For information, call 609-896-5000 or visit www.rider.edu.