The newest album by False Azure Records, "In the Cabinet of Wonders with Scheidemann and Schop: Music for Organ and Violin from 17th-Century Hamburg," featuring violinist Martin Davids and organist David Yearsley will be presented in recital on February 1st at Anabel Taylor Chapel.
Yearsley and Davids join forces to capture the wild, improvisatory, near-avant-garde rapture of music in 17th-century Hamburg. Following in the footsteps of a legendary partnership — organist-composer Heinrich Scheidemann and violinist Johann Schop — Yearsley and Davids navigate a musical world as uniquely specific as it is riddled with intangibility. Munetaka Yokota’s 2010 Baroque organ at Anabel Taylor Chapel lends its pliant voice to this luminous performance by two masterful listeners.
Violinist Martin Davids and organist David Yearsley have been making music together for more than two decades—from renaissance dances and virtuoso sonatas performed on historical instruments to electrified versions of baroque favorites served up by their once-upon-a-time band discontinuo. The Davids-Yearsley duo’s imaginative, historically adroit engagement with music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been heard on the BBC, at concerts across the United States, and on their 2007 recording All Your Cares Beguiles: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London (from Musica Omnia). Founding director of the Callipygian Players, Mr. Davids also serves as concertmaster of Brandywine Baroque (DE), Bella Voce Sinfonia, and often leads the Bach Collegium San Diego, in addition to his work with the Haymarket Opera Company, Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, Ensemble Galilei, Chicago Opera Theater, Central City Opera. A native of Chicago, Mr. Davids’ many recordings include Henry Eccles’ 12 Sonatas for violin and continuo and those of Michael Christian Festing. As can be heard on his Baroque and Alone of 2022 and in his pair of volumes (2016, 2019) of arrangements for two violins of J. S. Bach’s solo violin fugues, Mr. Davids is a composer and creative adaptor of music in historical styles; his set of French harpsichord solos transcribed for violin and viola duet appeared in 2020, as did his Chaconne for solo viola (or violin). Host of the “Classical Happy Hour” podcast, he performs on a Baroque violin by Ferdinando Alberti from 1750 with Baroque bows by Canadian master bow makers Michelle Speller and Stephen Marvin.
Join us on Saturday, February 1st at 7:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.
