Kenneth Slowik told the audience he “might have gone over the deep end” a bit in the program of French baroque works he conducted with the Music of the Baroque Thursday at St. Paul’s Church in Chicago. The implication was that stuffing a program with so much nearly forgotten 18th Century music, none of which the orchestra had played before, might make a nice parlor game for musicologists but not for anyone else.
Slowik was being disingenuous, of course. The guest conductor has been deeply immersed in this relatively obscure repertory, and under his skilled direction the concert, dubbed “Vive la France!,” lived up to the exclamation mark. Listeners discovered some delightful works by composers most had never heard before, except perhaps on recordings — Andre Campra, Marin Marais, Jean-Marie Leclair and Jean-Philippe Rameau. MOB has long neglected French repertory, so Thursday’s accomplished performances (assembled with limited rehearsal) were doubly welcome. Once again, the MOB players proved they are the most adaptable small orchestra in town.
This was something of a homecoming for Slowik, artistic director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society in Washington, D.C. He grew up in Chicago and served for eight years during the ’70s as MOB’s principal cellist before launching a solo career on strings and keyboard that eventually led to the podium. Like the other candidates for MOB music director who have come through Chicago, he is equally at home with period and modern orchestras.
The four works on Slowik’s program traced the evolution of French baroque orchestral music from the rigidly stylized model of Jean-Baptiste Lully to more cosmopolitan, particularly Italian, forms of expression.
A cantata from Campra’s 1710 opera-ballet “The Venetian Festivals” was notable for the crisp dance rhythms and light, airy textures Slowik was able to achieve in a sequence of brief instrumental and vocal sections. The latter were sung with wonderful crystalline timbre and stylish authority by soprano Ann Monoyios.
From there Slowik moved on to his own suite of dances from Marais’ tragedy “Alcione” (1706), bringing out the subtle colors of each section, especially the famous tempest with its rumbling bass drum and wind machine under whooshing violins.
A Leclair violin concerto in A minor kept concertmaster Elliott Golub elegantly engaged in cascades of dancing figuration that sounded very much like Gallic Vivaldi. It made a lively prelude to the suite of 10 so-called “symphonies” Slowik drew from Rameau’s 1735 opera-ballet “Les Indes galantes” (“The Amorous Indies”). The high quality and sheer variety of musical invention here is astonishing. Slowik captured the brusque vigor of the more fanciful dances particularly well.
