Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, BWV 103

Jinsun Cho, organist

Sylvia Leith, alto | Blake Beckemeyer, tenor | Ross Tamaccio, bass

Robert Beizer, underwriter of the Noontime organ preludes
Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, underwriters

The Noontime Cantata Series is supported by generous gifts from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts

Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, BWV 103

Jinsun Cho, organist

Sylvia Leith, alto | Blake Beckemeyer, tenor | Ross Tamaccio, bass

Robert Beizer, underwriter of the Noontime organ preludes
Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, underwriters

The Noontime Cantata Series is supported by generous gifts from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts

Beckemeyer and Barry team up to direct BWV 37 in their first return to the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project this season.

The cantata features a intricate duet for soprano and alto, and a tenor aria with lost violin solo. The performance will utilize Masaaki Suzuki’s reconstruction.

Blake Beckemeyer, Evangelist/Arias/Tenor Concertist
Christ Church Cathedral Choir
Christopher Caruso-Lynch, conductor
Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra

Beckemeyer has his debut as the Evangelist and singing the arias in the Bach Johannes-Passion, BWV 245. The original conception of the work as argued by Daniel Melamed in "Hearing Bach’s Passions” is that there was one tenor who sang all arias, ensembles, and recitatives. Though a larger choir will be singing the larger ensembles, the performance will be with historical instruments and with soloists as concertists.

Beckemeyer joins the cantata project for the third presentation of its spring cantata, directed by baroque cellist Joanna Blendulf.

The work is secular cantata BWV 215, “Preise dein Glucke, gesegnetes Sachsen.” You will notice the first movement if you are a lover of Bach’s large-scale works. He reuses the title movement as the “Hosanna” in Messe in h-moll. Performances at the BBCP consist of two presentations of the cantata with a lecture given by renowned Bach scholar and IU musicology professor Dr. Daniel Melamed.

About the Director, Joanna Blendulf

Joanna Blendulf is associate professor of music in baroque cello/viola da gamba at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Blendulf has performed and recorded with leading period-instrument ensembles throughout the United States and abroad. She is currently co-principal cellist and principal viola da gamba player of the Portland Baroque Orchestra. She has also performed as principal cellist of Pacific MusicWorks, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra, and the New York Collegium. She was a principal cellist of the New World Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas and has performed with other modern orchestras, including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

Blendulf is an avid chamber musician, performing regularly on major concert series and appearing on numerous recordings with her groups, including the Ensemble Electra, Ensemble Mirable, Music of the Spheres, Nota Bene Viol Consort, and Wildcat Viols. She appears as a frequent guest viol player with the Catacoustic Consort and Parthenia, and has collaborated with acclaimed artists such as Monica Huggett, Stephen Stubbs, Matthias Maute, Bruce Dickey, and Joan Jeanrenaud. Blendulf’s world-premiere recording of the complete cello sonatas of Jean Zewalt Triemer with Ensemble Mirable was released in 2004.

Blendulf’s festival engagements have included performances at Tage Alter Musik Regenburg, Musica Antigua en Villa de Leyva in Colombia, the Bloomington, Boston, and Berkeley early music festivals, and the Ojai Music Festival, as well as the Carmel and Oregon Bach Festivals. She is also sought after as a teacher and chamber music coach and has served as a classroom and private instructor at the University of Oregon and the Berwick Academy. As an active member of the Viola da gamba Society of America, she teaches regularly at viol workshops such as the annual Conclave, Viols West, and Young Players Weekend, and has served as a national Circuit Rider teacher.

She holds performance degrees with honors from the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Jacobs School of Music, where she earned a Performer's Certificate for her accomplishments in early music performance.

Beckemeyer returns to Bloomington for the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project and joins Dana Marsh for BWV 101

Beckemeyer joins Christopher Cock for a presentation of two Bach cantatas and Handel Chandos I.

Beckemeyer sings the amazing chorale aria “Sei getreu” from BWV 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen.

Beckemeyer again joins the BBCP project in Bloomington as concertist for In allen meinen Taten, a chorale cantata with a glorious obbligato tenor aria with violin obbligato, to be played by the national baroque violin soloist and director of the project Ingrid Matthews.

In allen meinen Taten, BWV 97
Blake Beckemeyer, tenor concertist
Ingrid Matthews, violinist and director

Beckemeyer joins Christ Church Cathedral Canon Director of Music Christopher Caruso-Lynch in another presentation of Daniel Melamed’s historically-informed cantata project.

J.S. Bach, Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4
Blake Beckemeyer, tenor concertist
Christopher Caruso-Lynch, organ and director

For the anniversary of the chancel organ, the choristers and adult singers will present Vierne’s expansive mass for choir and two organs, a performing circumstance rarely used because of the practicality of a church having two full organs in its sanctuary.

“In 1899, Vierne set the Latin text of the mass ordinary without the Credo, which makes it a formally a short mass or missa brevis. He imagined a mass for orchestra, but Charles-Marie Widor, his teacher and organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris advised him to employ organs, for practical reasons. The mass was first performed at Saint-Sulpice in 1901, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December. The church has a great organ (grand orgue) in its back built by François-Henri Clicquot which Aristide Cavaillé-Coll had reconstructed and improved in 1862. The choir organ, in the choir, was built by Cavaillé-Coll in 1858. Vierne planned the effect of sound from the far ends of the church. In the premiere, Widor played the main organ, while the composer, who was by then organist at Notre-Dame de Paris, played the choir organ.”
—Wikipedia

Time/Location TBA

Beckemeyer joins Ken Yeung for a special performance of Charpentier’s expansive Midnight Mass for Christmas for octet and orchestra. Not to be overshadowed, the other half of the concert features one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti.

Mr. Beckemeyer joins the Beecher Singers of the Second Presbyterian Church and the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra to present Handel’s The Messiah. Mr. Beckemeyer will sing in the chorus and be featured as a soloist in the two major recitative and aria pairs, “Comfort Ye/Ev’ry Valley” and “He that dwelleth in heaven/Thou shalt break them” with these premier groups. This is the only Baroque period performance of the Messiah in Indianapolis this season.

Frescobaldi’s Missa de un’aria di Firenze makes up the majority of this program of Italian middle-baroque masters. Beckemeyer sings as soloist on the Mass as the concertist in the first choir.

Frescobaldi’s Missa de un’aria di Firenze makes up the majority of this program of Italian middle-baroque masters. Beckemeyer sings as soloist on the Mass as the concertist in the first choir.

Joanna Blendulf leads a program of pieces from the Odhecaton:

The repertoire includes two tutti motets, Crux triumphans by Loyset Compere and Gaspar van Weerbeke’s “Mater digna Dei.”

Mr. Beckemeyer joins Sarah Cranor in her ensemble: Tonos del Sur. The concert will feature music from Latin America and showcases both larger ensemble numbers along with intimate duets and trios. Many of these pieces have never been performed in America or even the Western Hemisphere.

Repertoire:

• “Salve regina,” Neves

• “Xicochi Conetzintle,” Fernández

• “Hanacpachap Cussicuinin”

• “Oh, admirabile sacramento”

• “¿Por qué, Pedro?”

• “Al nacimiento” à 4, Blasco

• “Oygan una Xacarilla,” Rafael Antonio Castellanos

Repertoire includes:

• The many headed beast, Yorkshire Feast

• I will give thanks unto thee, O Lord

• Celebrate this Festival, Birthday Ode for Queen Mary

• Cold Genius Scene, King Arthur