A Little Evening Concert for Louis XIV

Thursday, January 19, 7 p.m., Orcas Adventist Church

— from Jeffrey Cohan —

Suites assembled in 1713 for “little evening concerts” for Louis XIV of his favorite music from many decades will be premiered, almost surely for the first time since the death of Louis XIV in 1715 in this performance. A Little Evening Concert for Louis XIV will take place on Thursday, January 19 at 7:00 PM at Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church at 107 Enchanted Forest Road in Eastsound with baroque bassoonist Anna Marsh, baroque violinist Courtney Kuroda, baroque violist Stephen Creswell and baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan.

A remarkable and almost completely unknown manuscript of 770 pages discovered in Paris by Jeffrey Cohan was prepared in 1713 for evening performances for the aging Louis XIV by his long-time music librarian Andre Danican Philidor l’aine, who organized and transcribed some of Louis’ favorite music from at least the previous 54 years, possibly for performance by a select group of the king’s favorite instrumentalists. Two years before his death in 1715, Louis XIV was particularly anxious to revisit the music of his youth and the ensuing decades, and Philidor dates some of these selections as far back as 1659, when Louis XIV was 21 and had danced for eight years already in ballet performances at court, most famously as the sun god Apollo.

Many of the 67 suites from this unique manuscript have probably not otherwise been heard anywhere since the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Eleven of them have been performed in the last few years by Jeffrey Cohan in Washington, DC for the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival, and for the Salish Sea Early Music Festival.

The suites of between two and twelve movements each, some very short and others quite long, often with colorful titles representative of the opera texts, consist of transcriptions for a smaller ensemble of excerpts from operas and instrumental works mostly by Jean-Baptiste Lully, the king’s indispensable court composer since 1653 who had been dead already for 26 years in 1713, and other composers such as the younger Michel-Richard de la Lande and Philidor himself.

Entitled “Collection of Symphonies and Trios by Mr. Lully and several Trios by Mr. De la Lande/ For the little concerts given for his Majesty in the evenings/ collected and put in order by Philidor le Pere”, the manuscript contains individual parts for two soprano instruments (flutes, violins or oboes), an haute-contre or high tenor part, and an unfigured bass, implying that no chordal instrument (such as harpsichord or lute) was used, with each part consisting of 145 manuscript pages to which is affixed the same engraved nine pages of title page and table of contents. This exciting and extensive new source of chamber music at the court of Louis XIV is to be explored on the baroque instruments with which the king was familiar.

The baroque bassoon was a favored bass instrument, particularly in chamber music settings, as is evidenced by a beautifully bound manuscript in the Library of Congress, the “Simphonies Choisies” assembled in 1695 by Philidor as a present from Louis XIV to the Duke of Bavaria, which also contains no figures to be realized by any chordal instrument and mentions no bass instrument other than bassoon.