Organ music at Cornell begins again this Wednesday at 12:30pm, as we launch our Fall 2024 recital series with Midday Music for Organ in Sage Chapel, on the sometimes spicy, sometimes cantankerous, and always alluring Italian baroque organ. David Yearsley and Annette Richards will play music from 17th-century Italy and Germany, focusing on two landmark publications issued 400 years ago: Girolamo Frescobaldi's Capricci and Samuel Scheidt's Tabulatura Nova, both of 1624—transalpine monuments of musical art whose early modern ambitions haven't dimmed in the intervening centuries and whose intelligence is anything but artificial.
In two weeks time at Midday Music for Organ, David will perform glorious works by J. S. Bach in Anabel Taylor Chapel on the Cornell Baroque Organ.
For the full series, please see below or visit the website of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards here.
All events are free and open to the public.
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September 11 (Sage Chapel) Annette Richards and David Yearsley. “Fantasies, Toccatas and Capriccios.” 17th-century music by Frescobaldi and contemporaries on the mean-tone Neapolitan organ.
An excursion into the fantasy-filled world of Baroque Europe, including the virtuosic counterpoint of Roman virtuoso Girolamo Frescobaldi, the Italianate fantasies of North German organist Dieterich Buxtehude, David Yearsley’s own variations in 17th-century style, and, to open this semester’s series, the famous four-hand testaments to a musical friendship by Thomas Tomkins and Nicholas Carleton.
September 25 (Anabel Taylor) David Yearsley. “The World-Famous Organist, J. S. Bach.”
David Yearsley presents monuments of the organ art, with the music of J. S. Bach. The program includes the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major (BWV 552), Sonata no. 2 in C Minor, (BWV 526), and one of the most moving of all Bach’s chorale settings, “O Mensch bewein dein Sünde groß” (BWV 622).
October 9 (Anabel Taylor) Annette Richards. “Ancient and Modern, c. 1773.” Music by Stanley, Purcell, Frescobaldi, Bach, and Scheidemann.
Following in the footsteps of the English music historian Dr. Charles Burney as he traversed Europe in the early 1770s gathering information for his groundbreaking History of Music, Annette Richards takes listeners to mid 18th-century London, Rome, Dresden and Hamburg, to explore music both historical and recent, ‘ancient and modern’ to use the language of Burney and his musical friends.
October 23 (Sage Chapel) Guest. Ivan Bosnar. “The Organist Improviser.”
Original improvisations and repertoire originally created in performance at the instrument, presented by prize-winning improviser and organist from Croatia, Ivan Bosnar.
November 6 (St Luke Lutheran Church). Jeffrey Snedeker. “The French Connection.” Includes music by Lefébure-Wély, Franck and Dubois.
A recital on the beautiful Cavaillé-Coll style instrument, built by Juget-Sinclair, (Opus 45, 2015-16) presenting the sounds of the French Romantic organ as listeners and players might have experienced them around the turn of the 20th century. With music by Lefébure-Wély, Franck and Dubois, as well as an incursion later into the 20th century, the program offers a snapshot of the extraordinary repertoire created in France for the organs of Cavaillé-Coll and his successors.
November 20 (Anabel Taylor Chapel) David Yearsley. “Samuel Scheidt’s Tabulatura Nova at 400.”
Celebrating the revolutionary and encyclopedic survey of techniques of organ composition, published in three volumes in Halle in 1624, that constitutes one of the most important publications of keyboard music before the 18th century.
December 4 (Sage Chapel) The Cornell Organists: Music for Advent and Christmas. Includes music by J. S. Bach, Messiaen, and others, with David Yearsley, Annette Richards, and friends.
The Cornell organists bring the semester’s lunchtime recitals to a conclusion on both the Italian organ and the Aeolian-Skinner, with seasonal music from three centuries and including David Yearsley’s improvised Toccata on O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.
