Get Ready for Beethoven 9 By John Tamilio III, Ph.D. According to legend, Ludwig van Beethoven had to be turned around to face the audience after his Symphony No. 9’s 1824 premiere; his hearing loss was so acute that he couldn’t hear their rapturous applause. Nevertheless, this first audience was clearly awestruck by the otherworldly quality of this magnum opus, which would become a staple of the classical canon. Along with being a masterful, complex piece of music, Symphony No. 9 has been used to mark important moments in time, popping up all over Western culture. It was played to celebrate t ..read more

By John Tamilio III, Ph.D. There is a moment during H+H’s performance of Handel’s Messiah when two horn players emerge from opposite wings of the Symphony Hall balcony and play a fanfare. It is one of my favorite parts of the oratorio. My heart skips a beat at the sound of this majestic flourish, imagining that this is how the piece would have sounded in 1741 when George Frideric Handel composed it. After all, as with the rest of the H+H Orchestra, the horn players perform on period instruments (or preeminent replicas). In this edition of Feeling HIP?, we’ll explore the difference between a fe ..read more

By John Tamilio III, Ph.D. The Handel and Haydn Society has been a leading player in the Boston music scene for over 200 years, but for the past four decades—since the arrival of former Artistic Director Christopher Hogwood in 1986—it has been in the vanguard of ensuring the early music capital of North America has consistently excellent historically informed performances. In historically informed performance, affectionately known as “HIP,” musicians work to present music from the past as faithfully as possible, keeping close to the intent of the composers and striving to perform the pieces as ..read more

Dr. Ellen Harris didn’t plan on writing a book about homosexual subtext in George Frideric Handel’s chamber cantatas. But as one of the foremost Handel scholars in the world—Dr. Harris is the Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the current President of the Handel House Foundation of America—she had to follow where the research led her. The result was her landmark book Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas, published by Harvard University Press nearly 20 years ago. In celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, we sat down with Dr. Harr ..read more

H+H principal flute Emi Ferguson grew up in Brookline listening to the Handel and Haydn Society. She stretches the boundaries of the modern-day musician as a flutist, singer, and composer, performing with period ensembles around the world. This month, she’ll light up the Symphony Hall stage as the soloist for Mozart’s first flute concerto, one of the pieces on the program for Mozart + Mendelssohn. We sat down with Emi to learn more about her practice, her perspective, and what we can expect from her performances next weekend. When did you first encounter Mozart’s first flute concerto? I first ..read more

Audiences are asking what semi-staged entails—is there a better description? I think as a director, “semi-staged” just makes me bristle and laugh—but I like to think of projects like this as a way to put energy and focus into very different parts of opera, and craft a “new” art form that is not a fully produced opera, but also not just a concert. It hovers somewhere in between those worlds at its best.  For this concert—given the realities of having the orchestra onstage and visible as well as just logistical elements like rehearsal time being short—we consciously decided to focus on the ..read more

Louise Farrenc By Benjamin Pesetsky With thanks to Teresa Neff Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 premiered on a program alongside Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the Société des concerts du Conservatoire de Paris. It was 1849, and she was a piano professor in her mid-40s at the Paris Conservatoire. Her symphony’s premiere was notable not only because it was a work by a female composer, but also because French audiences at the time were more interested in opera and chamber music than in orchestra concerts. And even when it did come to orchestral music, homegrown French composers were less highly re ..read more

Brooklyn-based composer and bass-baritone Jonathan Woody recently composed his Suite for Orchestra after the works of Charles Ignatius Sancho, an H+H commissioned work based on music in the compositions of Charles Ignatius Sancho (1729 – 1780), the first person of African descent to publish classical music. In this blog post, Woody discusses more about the process of creating this piece. What did you find particularly interesting or impactful when researching Charles Ignatius Sancho? It was particularly poignant to me that he was the first Black Briton to have voting rights in a parliamentary ..read more

Charles Ignatius Sancho By Benjamin Pesetsky Sancho’s Early Life Charles Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) is remembered by the British Library as a “writer, composer, shopkeeper, and abolitionist.” We know a great deal about his life from his letters, with further details provided by a 1782 biography. According to this account, Sancho was born on a slave ship sailing from Guinea to the port of Cartagena in the Spanish West Indies (modern Colombia), though Sancho himself believed he had been born in Africa and taken to South America as an infant. He was soon orphaned and then brought to England, whe ..read more

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Violinist, Fencer, Soldier, and Classical-era Composer of African Descent By Benjamin Pesetsky With thanks to Teresa Neff Joseph Bologne’s Early Life Joseph Bologne (1745–1799), Chevalier de Saint-Georges, held a remarkable number of occupations and positions during his life: composer, conductor, violinist, impresario, champion fencer, military officer, and nobleman. All even more remarkable considering the circumstances of his birth to an enslaved mother, Nanon, on the Caribbean island of Basse-Terre, part of the French colony of Guadeloupe. Bologne ..read more