Fireworks in Calgary; L'Allegro in Warsaw next month
Courtesy of the Calgary Philharmonic
Baroque at the Bella — Calgary
On October 23, Nic returned to Calgary, a city he has come back to again and again and loves in every season but one — "very thrilled," he admitted beforehand, "not to be going in the dead of winter." The program was a party with a point. Handel wrote his Music for the Royal Fireworks to celebrate a 1749 peace treaty between England and France; across the Channel, Rameau wrote the suite from his opera Naïs for the very same peace. Nic set them as bookends — "good excuses," he said, "for a musical party" — with a Bach cantata the Calgary Philharmonic specially asked for, No. 99, in between. Flamboyant, ceremonial, and genuinely festive: Handel, he noted, does most of the work for you.
The day before the concert, Nic joined Global News Morning in the Calgary studio to preview the program. The conversation is now online.
Courtesy of ProMusica
A Last-Minute Mozart in Columbus
Some of the season's best music arrives unannounced. On a week's notice, Nic stepped in for David Danzmayr to open ProMusica Chamber Orchestra's 48th season at the Southern Theatre in Columbus, Ohio, on October 17 and 18: Mozart's Great Mass in C minor with the Columbus Choral Artists, alongside a Mozart divertimento and Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight.
A Return to Warsaw — November 13 and 14
In November Nic goes to Warsaw for the first time in earnest. He passed through once, for a single day, back in 2005; now he gets a whole week, and the Warsaw Philharmonic gave him a rare gift — his choice of a Handel oratorio. He chose L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, one of his favorites and, he will tell you, one of the best: a work he introduced to American audiences years ago with the Mark Morris Dance Group. It has no plot, only John Milton's words — "as usual with Milton, vaguely incomprehensible, but very beautiful."
Looking Ahead — Messiah on Wall Street, and the Christmas Oratorio on Two Continents
December brings the heart of the season. Nic conducts Handel's Messiah on period instruments at Trinity Church Wall Street — a storied room he has, remarkably, never worked in, and an unusually sacred setting for a piece Handel first gave in the theater. Days later he is in Denmark for Bach's Christmas Oratorio with the Aalborg Symphony, then home in Berkeley to close the year with the same Christmas Oratorio alongside Cantata Collective — two pillars of the December repertoire, on two continents, inside three weeks.
Ask him how he keeps it fresh after six decades and the answer is less about scholarship than delight. The composers, he insists, "were real people — they joked, they had foibles, they loved, they lost." His job is to put the audience in the room with them. "One of the great things about being a musician," he says, "is that you are, to some extent, a magician — and your job is to produce that magic." The surest sign he is still having fun, he jokes, is a light bulb glowing brightly somewhere behind his eyes.
From the Blog — Roving & Recipes: Frankfurt an der Oder
Late last month, Nic spent a week in the other Frankfurt: Frankfurt an der Oder, a small city on Germany's eastern border with Poland, about an hour by train from Berlin. His new Roving & Recipes post explores the old Hanseatic town, where C.P.E. Bach studied law at the university in the 1730s, and then heads to the kitchen for a feast of dumplings. Nic shares recipes for Klösse, the potato dumplings made for mopping up Sauerbraten; Semmelknödel, the Bavarian and Austrian bread dumplings; Germknödel, steamed yeast dumplings filled with plum jam and finished with poppy seeds and vanilla sauce; and Marillenknödel, whole apricots wrapped in a soft cheese dough and rolled in buttered breadcrumbs. He also includes his favorite dish from a café near his hotel, Berlin-style calf's liver with fried onions and apples, best enjoyed with a dry Riesling from near Dresden.