Salish Sea Early Music Festival: Telemann Paris Quartets
Free (suggested donation: $20-$30, ages 18 & under free)
- David Greenberg, baroque violin
- Elisabeth Wright, harpsichord
- Susie Napper, viola da gamba
- Jeffrey Cohan, baroque flute
The vibrant "Telemann Paris Quartets" are to be celebrated in this third program of the 2024 Salish Sea Early Music Festival featuring violinist David Greenberg, harpsichordist Elisabeth Wright, viola da gambist Susie Napper, and baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan. One of the most prolific and influential composers of all time, Georg Philipp Telemann's "Paris Quartets" were written for and during his most significant journey away from home during his lifetime.
Having been invited by several of the most prominent French musicians to visit Paris, Telemann composed and published the first set of his remarkable "Paris Quartets" in 1730 and finally left Hamburg for Paris seven years later, where all 12 of his new quartets, greatly tailored to the French style, were performed, almost surely with Telemann himself playing harpsichord. The second set of quartets was published during this eight-month stay in Paris in 1738. Two years later Telemann related his experience in Paris:
"The admirable performances of these quartets by Messrs Blavet (transverse flute), Guignon (violin), the younger Forcroy [i.e. Forqueray] (viola da gamba) and Edouard (cello) would be worth describing were it possible for words to be found to do them justice. In short, they won the attention of the ears of the court and the town, and procured for me in a very little time an almost universal renown and increased esteem."
This program consists of two quartets from his 1730 set entitled "Quadri a violino, flauto traversiere, viola da gamba o violoncello, e fondamento," and two from the 1738 publication entitled "Nouveaux quatuors en six suites."
About David Greenberg, baroque violin
About Susie Napper, viola da gamba
About Jeffrey Cohan, baroque flute
Flutist Jeffrey Cohan, who the Boston Globe calls "The Flute Master," has performed in 25 countries throughout Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and for the USIA Arts America Program in the South Pacific, South America, Turkey, and Portugal. First Prize winner of the Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Competition in New York and recipient of grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music and the French Government, he has received international acclaim both as a modern flutist and as one of the foremost specialists on transverse flutes from the renaissance through the early 19th Century. The only musician to have been awarded both the highest prize in the Concours Musica Antiqua in Bruges, Belgium and in the Erwin Bodky Competition in Boston, two of the most prestigious prizes for performers of early music on period instruments, he has premiered new music by many American and European composers. Jeffrey Cohan directs the Cascade Early Music Festival, the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival, and the Black Hawk Chamber Music Festival. The New York Times has heralded his ability to "play several superstar flutists one might name under the table."
https://www.jeffreycohan.com/