This year’s edition of the Valletta International Baroque Festival begins at the Manoel Theatre with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Musical Offering, BWV 1079, on Saturday.
The well-known orchestra Le Concert des Nations will be conducted by the Spanish celebrity director, viol player and composer Jordi Savall. Bach dedicated this Musikalisches Opfer to the music-lover and gifted flautist King Frederick the Great of Prussia. It was the king’s original theme on which Bach based a collection of keyboard canons and fugues as well as other pieces of music which constitutes this Offering. Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, was court musician to the king, and in 1747 the younger Bach presented his father to the King in Potsdam.
The king presented the elder Bach with a difficult and complicated theme so as to compose a three-part fugue based on it. Later the king challenged the composer to write a six-part fugue which Bach later obliged. The rest is history.
Considered one of Bach’s masterpieces, The Musical offering is well-known but not so another work which features on January 18 at the Jesuit church at 7.30pm. Although not by a Maltese composer, it has strong connections with Malta.
This work is Messa de Morti à 5 concertata, 1653 by Padre Bonaventura Rubino (c. 1600-1668). This Sicilian-born Franciscan friar was mainly active in northern Italy. The Malta connection lies in that the only extant copy of the original (lost) manuscript is preserved in the music archives of the Mdina Cathedral Museum.
This precious document came to light in the mid-1970s, when with the full collaboration of Dun (later Mgr) Ġwann Azzopardi and Sicilian musicologist Emilio Carapezza, a project La Sicilia ritrovata a Malta aimed at the study of works by composers active in Sicily and Malta be they Sicilian or otherwise. The work was later edited by Nicolò Maccavino. It is interesting to note that Rubino inserted brief instrumental works by contemporary composers between the various movements of the Requiem, as was quite common practice in those days. These composers are Rossi, Carissimi, Froberger, Frescobaldi and Cavalli.
This Mass will be performed by the Cappella Musicale di Santa Maria in Campitelli, La Cantoria Ensemble and the Studio di Musica Antica Antonio il Verso of Palermo, directed by Vincenzo Di Betta, who is the Maestro di Cappella at the church of Santa Maria in Campitelli, Rome.
Di Betta had been involved in the first modern performance (November 2012) and first recording of Rubino’s Requiem Mass. He thinks that this performance will be a special event in the Maltese cultural milieu. He says that Malta is extremely fortunate in having such a rich, centuries-old cultural heritage preserved in Mdina, whereas in Italy so many precious archives were lost because of war and natural calamities.
Di Betta felt honoured when he was invited to direct Rubino’s Requiem for the festival. He hopes that with the continued collaboration with festival artistic director Kenneth Zammit Tabona, as well as with Mgr Ġwann Azzopardi and the Mdina Cathedral Chapter, this collaboration will become an annual event.
Di Betta added that another unique Rubino work which is preserved in the Mdina Cathedral Music Archives will be revived in Malta in 2017 to mark a special anniversary for the Archives, later to be recorded by the Tactus label.
This same label recorded Rubino’s Requiem and for the launching of which Di Betta was present early last year.
Both performances start at 7.30pm.
Programme
Saturday – Bach’s Musical Offering, Manoel Theatre, 7.30pm
Sunday – Bach’s Sonatas for violin and piano, Manoel, 12pm; Baroque Treasure Hunt, Manoel, 3pm; Unitate Melos, Ta’ Ġieżu Church, 5.30pm
Monday, January 18 – Bonaventura Rubino, Messa de Morti à 5 Concertata, Jesuits Church, 7.30pm
Tuesday, January 19 – Goldberg Variations, Bibliotheca (National Library), 7.30pm; Il Spiritillo Brando, Ta’ Ġieżu church, 7.30pm
Wednesday, January 20 – Inspired by Baroque, Manoel, 7.30pm
Thursday, January 21 – L’Arte del Madrigale, St Nicholas (All Souls) church, 7.30pm
Friday, January 22 – Venetian Graces, President’s Palace, 7.30pm
Saturday, January 23 – Roberto Cominati, Manoel, 11.30am; A Musical Banquet, St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, 4.30pm; The Italian Job, Manoel, 7.30pm
Sunday, January 24 – Great Baroque Composers, Manoel, 12pm; Baroque Kid Power, Manoel, 3pm; The Four Seasons – Vivaldi, Manoel, 5.30pm
Monday, January 25 – Du Treuer Gott (The True God), St John’s Co-Cathedral, 7.30pm
Tuesday, January 26 – Unity in Diversity, St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, 7.30pm
Wednesday, January 27 – The Legend of Orlando: Battles, Love and Madness, Manoel, 7.30pm
Thursday, January 28 – Elements of Dance, Manoel, 7.30pm
Friday, January 29 – The Music of Silence – The Magic of the Lute, St Nicholas (All Souls) Church, 12pm; Niccolò Jommelli Requiem, Jesuits Church, 7.30pm
Saturday, January 30 – Beatles Go Baroque, Manoel, 12pm; Baroque Festival Ball, Manoel, 9pm
For more details, visit www.vallettabaroquefestival.com.