Ars Lyrica Houston is no stranger to a holiday program.
The Grammy-nominated ensemble, known for bringing Baroque era masterworks to life on period instruments, has celebrated Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. But on October 31 at 5 p.m., the musicians are asking concertgoers to put on their costumes and join them at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts for Haunted Spirits – their first ever Halloween program.
Ars Lyrica Founder and Artistic Director Matthew Dirst says there are plenty of “eerie, haunted sounding, crazy sounding pieces” from the 17th and 18th century to choose from and some natural places to start looking.
“Handel mad scenes were an obvious place to go,” says Dirst.
Often found in 17th- and 18th-century opera and oratorio, mad scenes usually feature a character in a moment of psychological turmoil, and those characters are often female.
“Women were perceived as being emotionally less stable than men, and particularly when they’re depicted on the stage, they tend to be caricatured,” says Dirst. “The idea that a woman should turn hysterical if she’s faced with an insoluble dilemma, or some bit of dramatic business, was fairly common.”
Dirst says George Frideric Handel’s mad scenes “are maybe more striking than some of his contemporaries,” and Haunted Spirits will feature three of them, one from his 1745 musical drama Hercules and two from his 1735 opera Alcina.
“Where Shall I Fly” from Hercules is a “chaotic, long-ish aria in multiple sections” where the hero’s wife, Dejanira, “who’s basically caused his doom, suddenly regrets it and realizes what a horrible thing she’s done.”
“She literally rips out her hair in despair about her role in his demise,” says Dirst. “She veers from one thing to the next with really no transitions between the musical sections.”
Meanwhile, the titular sorceress in Alcina has what Dirst calls a “little moment,” wondering if she can go on living after she realizes her love, the crusader Ruggiero, is leaving her.
Nikola Printz will make their Ars Lyrica (and Houston) debut for the pieces, and Dirst says he is excited to bring Printz, “a fearless mezzo, somebody who’s really capable of singing almost anything in this repertoire,” to town.
“I think [Printz] is a very striking singer, somebody who’ll make a good impression,” says Dirst.
In addition to the Oedipus-inspired song, “Music for a While,” English composer Henry Purcell contributes his own mad scene to the program: 1683’s “Bess of Bedlam,” which finds Bess as a patient at the notorious Bethlehem Hospital, a 17th-century London facility for the mentally disturbed commonly known as Bedlam.
“She too is lovesick, and her king, as she calls him, has somehow disappeared, either jilted her or died,” says Dirst. “It’s not clear what’s happened, and she goes through this process similar to the Handel mad scenes, where she wonders what she’s going to do.”
Though she despairs, Dirst notes that it ends on a happy, if creepy, note. “She ends, curiously, quite happily, by noting that she’s at least the lord of her own universe within this insane asylum, and that nothing bad can happen to her there,” says Dirst. “But it’s fairly clear that she’s out of her mind.”
Though mad scenes proved to be an obvious direction, and Ars Lyrica has done at least one Handel mad scene years ago, the program will open with “the strangeness” of a work Ars Lyrica has never programmed before: Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Élémens. Composed between 1737 and 1738, the suite begins with the aptly titled movement “Chaos.”
Dirst describes the movement’s beginning gesture as “totally unprecedented for its time.”
“It’s all 12 notes of the chromatic scale sounding at once, so it’s a grinding dissonance that practically begs out for resolution, and you don’t really get it for some time,” says Dirst. “[Rebel] just grinds away at that horrible dissonance for a while.”
Though Dirst says the piece could be equally successful played on modern instruments in a bigger setting, using the original instruments of the time, in a medium orchestration and in the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall, “makes the sound a bit earthier and a bit more intimate” than it might be otherwise.
Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini’s Sonata in G Minor, also known as the “Devil’s Trill,” is a violin sonata said to have come straight from the devil himself, as witnessed by Tartini in 1713 during a dream. At least, that’s Tartini’s claim.
“Whether the composer is actually telling the truth or not is immaterial because the piece has acquired a reputation,” says Dirst. The “Devil’s Trill” earned its name for “some fiendishly difficult trills said only to be played by the devil himself because they’re so eerie and weird in the final movement.”
Though Dirst says the rest of the work is a quite conventional four-movement sonata for violin and continuo,” it does require the “talents of a really terrific violinist.” For Haunted Spirits, the New York-born Juilliard School graduate Manami Mizumoto will meet its demands, returning to Ars Lyrica to head up the violin section and play the solo.
So, what makes the “Devil’s Trill” so demanding?
“Because you have to trill on one string while you’re playing something else on the other,” explains Dirst. “So, it’s multiple stops, literally. You’re using multiple strings at once, so your left hand gets kind of contorted into weird positions because you’ve got to keep a trill going with two fingers while you actually finger another string. That’s not easy.”
A work from Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, rounds out the program.
“With C.P.E. Bach, we find somebody who is interested in emotional extremes, which is perfect for the program,” says Dirst. “His symphonies tend toward the weird, and I’ve selected perhaps the weirdest of the lot.”
The “weirdest of the lot” would be Bach’s “heavily chromatic” Symphony in E Minor from 1756.
“In other words, you’re not always able to predict where the piece is going harmonically,” explains Dirst. “His symphonies are experimental. They have a kind of emotional quicksilver quality to them because they never linger on one thing very long. It’s something that’s very turbulent, and then a long pause, and then something that’s very tender, and then back and forth rather quickly between those two extremes.”
Every work on the program presents a slightly different side of the same coin, and Dirst says he enjoyed putting them all together. “I’ll confess, it presented a nice opportunity to focus on the weird and the eerie and the uncanny, which we sometimes get in smaller doses, but not for an entire program.”
Dirst adds, “It should make people nicely spooked out by the time they leave the hall.”
Haunted Spirits is scheduled for 5 p.m. Saturday, October 31, at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby. For more information, visit arslyricahouston.org or call 713-315-2525. $40–$80, with $15 student tickets available.
