Interview with Suzanne Rousso and Stephanie Vial
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credits: © Mark Banka and Marion Meakem, resp.)

This Sunday on Preview, The Classical Station’s Dan McHugh speaks with Suzanne Rousso, Artistic Director of Mallarmé Music, and Stephanie Vial, Artistic Director of Baroque and Beyond and The Vivaldi Project about the upcoming North Carolina Historically Informed Performance (HIP) Music Festival. From February 4th through March 5th, the HIP Music Festival will present 17 concerts celebrating various composers and styles of Early Music. 

DAN: The first concert of the HIP Music Festival, Biber Bowl Revisited, focuses on the music of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Can you tell me about his music, why you decided to choose this composer, and what audiences can expect? 

SUZANNE: Biber was a composer who wrote primarily for string players. His music was brilliant and difficult, and he used a tuning technique called scordatura. The instruments were tuned differently than was standard, giving a beautiful shimmering sound to the strings which you don’t find in other Baroque music. That technique was Biber’s innovation. Several years ago, we did a Biber Bowl featuring the Rosary Sonatas, a series of 16 sonatas based on the life of Christ; they’re all tuned differently and they all have different sounds. The audience showed a great reaction to them, so we’re revisiting Biber and some of his other wonderful works.

DAN: The HIP Music Festival includes many concerts that feature instruments and repertoire that may be unfamiliar to most people. How would you orient the audience to music they may not have heard before?

SUZANNE: I think one of the things about Early Music that people don’t realize is that it’s going to sound different. The timbres are different and the volume is different. A Baroque orchestra is much softer—for instance, a Baroque oboe has a very different sound than a modern oboe. It’s much less direct. It’s more intimate. Early musicians spend their lives learning how to make those differences and to reflect the intent of the composer—and, of course, we can’t hear recordings from that time, so we can only use what was said in treatises and by word of mouth. 

In Early Music ensembles, there are instruments similar to modern instruments, but there are also instruments like the viola da gamba or the baritone. No one knows what a baritone is except that Haydn wrote 100-something trios that include one. Early Music is not just Bach.

DAN: Stephanie, your ensemble, The Vivaldi Project, is presenting a concert on eighteenth-century string trios, with music by Beethoven, Haydn, Boccherini, and others. Can you tell us about the genre of string trios, what are the key differences from the more popular quartet format, and why highlighting this music is important?

STEPHANIE: I think the string trio is a part of chamber music history that we don’t know a lot about. Between 1716 and 1770, more string trios were published than quartets by a ratio of 5:1. The quartet became more successful, but at that time string trios were just as important, if not more important, than quartets. The trio was a really important part of development as composers explored what they could do with concertos and symphonies.

DAN: Can you tell us about some of the other concerts you’re planning to present during the festival? 

SUZANNE: There’s a large variety of concerts. We have the Biber Bowl, as well as a Celtic duo, which is a bit of an aberration from what we usually do for a HIP festival. However, traditional music and Celtic music are part of the history of music. David McCormick from Early Music America is presenting a lecture on the black fiddlers of Monticello. There’s a concert of orchestral music featuring the music of Vivaldi, Glinka, and Telemann, performed by The Raleigh Camerata. We’ll also do three violin concertos at Duke Chapel. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone. 

Join The Classical Station at 7 PM on Sunday, January 29th to listen to the full interview. Download our app, stream online on TheClassicalStation.org, or turn your radio to 89.7 FM!