Orchestra of St. Luke’s Returns to Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 18 October 2021 14:25

Written by Jack Angstreich

Orchestra of St. Luke's, photo by Richard Termine

On the evening of Thursday, October 14th, at Carnegie Hall, I had the privilege  of hearing the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the accomplished direction of Bernard Labadie, splendidly performing a program of superb Baroque music.

The concert began thrillingly with the popular Prèlude to the Te Deum in D Major by the extraordinary Marc-Antoine Charpentier, which was both elegant and stirring. Equally impressive was the premiere of a composite work entitled, An Imaginary Concerto for Violin, assembled by the conductor from selections from the corpus of Johann Sebastian Bach, including the Sinfonia and Adagio from the celebrated Easter Oratorio, along with the inexplicably rarely heard Sinfonia in D Major, BWV 1045, all played with admirable aplomb by Benjamin Bowman as soloist. Although one might be tempted to disapprove of this departure from Bach’s original intentions, Labadie presumably justified his reconstruction as being broadly consonant with the practices of the period—in any case, it would be a pleasure in almost any context to listen to these movements by maybe the greatest of all composers.

For the exultant first Sinfonia, the music director reassigned “passages for the violin section” to the soloist. For the lovely adagio sinfonia movement—from the same oratorio—that followed, the violin takes on the “solo line Bach originally wrote for an oboe.” The delightful Sinfonia in D Major is “generally regarded as part of a now-lost cantata” and “lacks an original ending in Bach’s own hand but was later finished by an unknown composer.” The program annotator added the following comment recalling similar remarks by Labadie near the start of the evening: “The festive appearance of trumpets and timpani resound the joy at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s return to Carnegie Hall after more than 18 months.”

The concert concluded triumphantly with a confident account of Georg Friedrich Händel’s glorious and beloved Water Music, traditionally arranged in three suites, although at this program, the order of the second and third, apparently in line with the conclusions drawn from musicological research. I might add that, perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing in the evening could quite surpass the exhilaration of the indelible and enchanting Alla Hornpipe movement. One anticipates the next appearance on a local stage of this fine ensemble.

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