Review: 'Baroque by Candlelight'

James Wilson & friends
Dec. 13, Wilton House Museum, Richmond

One of Richmond’s most appealing holiday musical events is the evening of baroque music staged by cellist James Wilson as a benefit for his springtime Richmond Festival of Music. This season Wilson plays a mostly supportive role, joining violinists Claire Jolivet and Theresa Salomon, flutist Mary Boodell and harpsichordist Carsten Schmidt in chamber works that might have been played in musicales in the homes of colonial and early national America.

The ensemble performs on period-style instruments in such a home, Wilton, an 18th-century mansion-turned-museum overlooking the James River in Richmond’s West End.

At least one work on the program, Corelli’s "Sonata da Camera a tre," Op. 2, No. 4, is known to have been heard in 18th-century Virginia; Thomas Jefferson acquired the score in France and played it at Monticello. Other pieces by Bach, Handel and Telemann were familiar to some early Americans. The String Trio No. 2 in D minor by John Antes circulated in Moravian communities from his native Bethelehem, PA, south to Salem (now Winston-Salem), NC. And the English-born Raynor Taylor would have aired his Cello Sonata in G major after he settled in Maryland in the 1760s.

Authenticity has its limits: Musicians visiting Wilton 200 years ago would not have played to 60 guests packed into the house’s "upper passage," or second-story hallway, as they were in the first of two concerts. A repeat of the program will be staged in the more spacious reception room of Wilton's Dependency Building.

On a damp and (for December) balmy night, early fiddles were intonationally finnicky; and making tonally complementary voices of two baroque violins proved to be as difficult as matching the tones of two operatic sopranos.

Jolivet fared better through most of the program, producing especially fine affectus, or stylized expressive effect, in the adagio of Bach’s Sonata in C minor, BWV 1017, and, with Boodell’s baroque flute, in the grave movement of Telemann’s Concerto in A major.

Wilson, who spent most of the program playing continuo with Schmidt, exploited his cameo in Taylor’s baroque-cum-classical sonata. Introducing the work, Wilson noted that Taylor, as a boy chorister singing at Handel’s funeral, dropped his hat into the composer’s grave; and that a musicale in colonial Maryland was called an "olio," an antique synonym for "hodgepodge." The work didn’t quite live up to such an introduction – but what music would?

"Baroque by Candlelight" repeats at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 14 at Wilton House Museum, 215 S. Wilton Road. Tickets: $25. Details: (804) 519-2098, www.richmondfestivalofmusic.org