Dallas Bach Society, New York Baroque Dance Company, James Richman
Biography Dallas Bach Society, New York Baroque Dance Company, James Richman
James Richman
The first musician since Leonard Bernstein to graduate Harvard, Juilliard, and the Curtis Institute of Music, James Richman studied conducting with Max Rudolf and Herbert Blomstedt, piano with Rosina Lhevinne and Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and harpsichord with Albert Fuller and Kenneth Gilbert, and also holds a degree in the History of Science magna cum laude from Harvard College. He was a prizewinner in four international competitions for early keyboard instruments, including first prize in the Bodky Competition of the Cambridge Society of Early Music, laureate of the Bruges Harpsichord Competition and bronze medal in the Paris Harpsichord Competition of the Festival Estival and in the First International Fortepiano Competition (Paris).
Beginning with his days at the Juilliard School with Albert Fuller, he has been an innovator and explorer in the field of Baroque and Classic Music on original instruments, especially in Baroque opera and opera-ballet. In series at Lincoln Center, the French Institute/Alliance Française (Soirées Baroques), Merkin Hall, and Princeton University, his Concert Royal ensemble brought “new” and exciting music from the seventeenth and eighteenth century to life with the finest instrumental and vocal soloists in the field. The ensemble played for every performance of Messiah and the Bach Passions at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue for decades, including recordings of the Mozart rewrite of Messiah and Anthems and Carols with the Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys.
As Music Director of the New York Baroque Dance Company (dir. Catherine Turocy) he has taken a major role in the production of numerous operas of Rameau, Handel, Purcell, Monteverdi, Gluck, Rousseau, and C.P.E. Bach., in addition to numerous performances with the Dallas Bach Society. Other performances include conducting the Hanover Band at the Pollença Festival (Majorca) and five summers conducting Baroque and Classic opera at the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival.
A recipient of the prestigious United States-France Exchange Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, James Richman was made a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1995, in recognition of his contributions to the field of music.
New York Baroque
Described as "truly excellent" and "studded with stars in the making" by the New York Times, New York Baroque Incorporated (NYBI) is a conductorless orchestra of period instruments based in New York City. With a passion for breathing life into 17th and 18th-century repertoire, the orchestra delivers vibrant and informed performances while nurturing dynamic collaborations between historical performance and contemporary composers. NYBI has shared the stage with renowned soloists, including Richard Egarr, Vivica Genaux, Monica Huggett, Jakub Jòzef Orliński, and has graced prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, Spoleto Festival USA, and Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. In a bid to elevate period instruments as a living art form, NYBI has premiered works by Nico Muhly, Hollis Taylor, and Huang Ruo, and has also resurrected unknown works of the Baroque, presenting modern-day premieres of Cavalli's Veremonda (1652), Aliotti's Santa Rosalia (1687), and Seckendorff's Proserpina (1777). 2018-2019 season NYBI launched Alchemy, with each program exploring a classical element: water, air, earth, and fire.
In the 2019-20 season, New York Baroque Incorporated made a triumphant return to Saint Thomas Church with two programs: the beloved holiday tradition of Handel's Messiah, as well as C. P. E. Bach's oratorio, The Last Suffering of Christ, both conducted by Jeremy Filsell. Adding to the festive cheer, Richard Egarr teamed up with NYBI in The Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center to present J.S. Bach: Orchestral Festival, a jubilant program of Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites. NYBI also made an exciting debut at Columbia University's Miller Theater with Reflecting Lully, a program inspired by Lully's multicultural upbringing.
Dallas Bach Society Choir
has historically been the Southwest’s primary resource for Baroque music on original instruments. The Dallas Bach Society unites the finest vocalists and instrumentalists in lively and informed performances of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Monteverdi, Couperin, and Schütz: all the great music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both masterpieces familiar to music lovers, and those awaiting their discovery.
Early Music
The term “Early Music” is often used to indicate music from before 1800, and usually also implies performance on older instruments. To be sure, modern symphony orchestras and chamber ensembles perform Bach and Mozart, but a performance of a Bach Passion, for instance, with and orchestra of 40-60 and a chorus to match, is a far different artistic experience that one with an orchestra of 10-20 with a chorus to match, particularly given that the instruments of the time were in general softer, and the singing much less forceful – concert halls with 2,000 seats were a development of a much later time.
The Dallas Bach Society mostly performs on “Period Instruments”, which means either original instruments of the period or copies based on these models. In addition to instruments like the viol, lute, and harpsichord, which are only rarely used in today’s orchestras, the usual orchestral instruments have evolved a great deal since the Baroque and Classical periods, so as to produce a much bigger and quite different sound. This is obvious in the case of instruments like the flute, which went from a one-keyed wooden instrument (capable obviously of playing all the Bach compositions!) to a metal instrument with a quite complicated key system designed to produce an even sound throughout the registers.
While this might seem to be a great improvement, it loses the many and varied effects used by composers faced with the more “primitive” versions of these instruments. For instance, Beethoven’s Sonata for (French) Horn, Opus 10, contains a very sad second movement in F Minor with several notes not “officially” available on the natural horn, which have to be produced by “stopping” the instrument by placing the fist into the bell of the horn. This produces a fainter and more strained sound than the usual “available” notes. But Beethoven exploits this for artistic purposes – at the height of pathos in this movement, there is a high, stopped, A flat, which is of necessity a cry of anguish, when played on the horn Beethoven knew. This was clearly intentional. With a modern keyed horn, all the notes are available in a pure, perfect form, and if the player simply executes the note normally producing a full and beautiful A flat, Beethoven’s artistic point is totally lost.
The violins, violas and cellos of the orchestra are also quite different today from when they were made by Stradivari, Amati, and the other great builders. They have all been taken apart, the necks reset, the insides changed and metal strings added, all with the idea of producing much more sound, to fill up larger concert halls. One might compare this to the difference between candlelight and an electric bulb.
So-called “Early Music” simply tries to reestablish the norms of sound and expression which would have been those the composers heard and wrote for, as well as bringing back instruments like the gamba and harpsichord and restoring to them their music, which is otherwise transcribed for the cello and piano, for instance. The complete idea, combined with period singing and dance, is to restore the experience of the music at it was originally conceived: no modern performance, regardless of how splendid, ever really provides this insight.
