Benignant Baroque

The NMMU Music Department presents Benignant Baroque.

During this concert the audience will listen to solos by third year music students: Robyn Lovemore (violin) and Esther Cloete (violin) as well as the NMMU Voice Studio Chorus.

As composer of the season, Buxtehude’s cantata Jesu meines Lebens Leben is the basis for this concert’s title. The cantata expresses the benedictory effect of Jesus’ sacrifice on the believer’s life. The Italian influence here is unmistakable: not only is it written on a ground bass, a copy of the Italian Romanesca aria, but Buxtehude gives this movement the title ‘aria’.

Embracing this cantata are two other compositions. Muffat’s Suite in D is the secular face of Buxtehude’s ecclesiastical preoccupations. Though a contemporary, Muffat’s music is grounded in the French style yet light and melodious like Italian 18th C music. Muffat was in fact the forerunner of the fully assimilated style so successfully adapted by the other German composers Händel, Telemann and J.S. Bach before these styles swept across all of continental Europe.

Guiseppe Sammartini, the older and lesser known brother of Giovanni had, like Händel before him, made a successful career in London England. The second opus to which this concerto grosso belongs was first published around 1738 and again by John Johnson of London, sometime between 1740 and 1762. It is this latter publication from which this program’s score and parts were made. The original engravings are a beautiful work of art in their own right.

Please join us at Bird Street Conservatoire for this concert which will prove to be an amazing performance.**