PUTNEY — Cellist Jennifer Morsches came up with the program for the upcoming concert by Sarasa Chamber Music Ensemble, “Trainspotting,” by listening, as odd as it might seem, to the music of the Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber.
“The bass line of Biber's Sonata No. 3 for violin and basso continuo sounded to me like a train,” says Morsches. “I was so impressed that I wanted to put together an evening of music around the image and sound of trains.”
On Friday, March 24, 2017, at 7:30 p.m., at Next Stage, 15 Kimball Hill Rd., Sarasa Chamber Music Ensemble will present Trainspotting, Sarasa's unique period-instrument and multimedia experience of train-inspired music performed on gut strings.
This musical locomotion in action features not only Biber's 3rd Violin Sonata, but also Antonín Dvorák's “American” String Quartet and Steve Reich's Different Trains for string quartet and pre-recorded performance tape.
“Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's incredibly exuberant violin Sonata No. 3 from the 1660s, composed some 100 years before trains were even invented, anticipates those very sounds we imagine when a locomotive chugs along its route,” writes Morsches at www.sarasamusic.org.
Connecting trains
The motion in Biber's sonata fascinated Morsches, Assistant Artistic Director of Sarasa, and gave her the unorthodox idea to program it with Dvorák and Reich.
Nonetheless, the train connections are genuine enough. She writes that Dvorák was a 19th-century train enthusiast and Reich has written a very personal musical account of railways in the 20th century.
Morsches concedes that musicians trained to play a composer like Biber seldom perform works like Reich's.
“I bet this is the first time Different Trains has ever been done in a program like this,” Morsches says. “But you know, I was looking at the Biber piece yesterday and found this music is in its way very minimalist. So it works even more smoothly when paired with a contemporary composer like Reich. The pieces on this program do hold together.
“Also, Dvorák was a trainspotter. He would spend hours outsides his father's house in a small village - Nelahozeves, near Prague - waiting for the trains to go by. His stunning string quartet is also inspired by a native- and Afro-Americans influences.”
Sarasa's “Trainspotting” concert will feature a video presentation to accompany the performance of Reich's Different Trains. Gregorio León, who has won the Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild's award for excellence in projection during Ridge's production of Anon(ymous), will manage the projection of the video images.
For this concert, British violinist Miranda Fulleylove and two Boston Far Criers, Jesse Irons on violin and Jason Fisher on viola, will join Morsches on cello.
Recitalist, chamber musician, continuo cellist and orchestral player in the U.S. and Europe, Jennifer Morsches is the principal cellist of Florilegium, with whom she has recorded numerous award-winning discs for Channel Classics Records. She also is the newly appointed principal cellist of Boston Baroque, as well as a member of the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. For each of the past 20 years, she has spent at least half a year playing in the U.K. with European ensembles.
Longtime local ties
Morsches graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, First Group Scholar, from Smith College with degrees in Music History and German Literature, and was awarded the Ernst Wallfisch Prize in Music.
“Besides attending Smith College in Northampton, I was part of the Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival in New Hampshire, so I have long been familiar with this area,” she says. “I have a very active U.S. musical career. Also when not abroad, I live with my partner, cellist Timothy Merton, in Putney.”
Morsches and Merton are the Artistic Directors of Sarasa, which was founded in 1997 by Merton. It is a performing collective of more than one hundred instrumentalists and singers. Its name is a combination of Saraswathi, the Hindu goddess of art and culture, and the Sanskrit word rasa, which means the essence of sound. The group presents music spanning the 17th to the 21st centuries, on both period and modern instruments.
Drawing on a pool of musicians from the U.S. and Europe, the ensemble varies in size according to the program and repertoire. The ensemble, which produces the Sarasa Chamber Series in Cambridge and Concord, Mass., has performed at such prestigious venues as the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Boston Early Music Festival Series, and the University of Vermont's Lane Series.
“But the big thing we do at Sarasa is our outreach program,” Morsches says. “In fact, that is how our ensemble came into existence.”
The idea for Sarasa Chamber Music Ensemble was born through a concert given before inmates at a maximum security prison in 1997.
As Merton explains at Sarasa's website, “A friend, who was volunteering at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, suggested I give a concert for 40 guys who were in a music program there. I brought my cello to a little room with a funky upright piano. It was quite the scene.”
New territory
The inmates' response surprised Merton.
“The guys were just glued,” he writes. “Afterwards, they wanted to know everything about us and the music. Their openness to something of beauty that spoke to a more profound place within them meant a lot."
Merton returned a year later with a Baroque group, including a harpsichord, and played in the prison's chapel to a larger crowd. The two concerts were so personally rewarding that Merton decided he wanted to give more concerts to those who ordinarily had little access to classical music, such as those in other adult prisons, correctional facilities for teenagers, homes for the elderly, mental hospitals, and institutions for the disabled.
In the past 17 years, Sarasa has given over 250 presentations and residencies at teenage correctional facilities in Massachusetts. Their extensive and unfailing Outreach Program has been widely acknowledged. In 2007, Sarasa won the “outstanding achievement award” from Early Music America in recognition of its invaluable work with incarcerated teens in the Greater Boston area.
Although Sarasa's directors have put their roots down in Windham County, Timothy Merton is unable to be part of this concert, only because he is too busy doing maple sugaring on his farm in Putney.
Sarasa hasn't performed that much in Southern Vermont. But recently that has changed.
“Besides the upcoming Next Stage concert, early this winter Sarasa performed a successful concert in Brattleboro, and this summer will do a concert as part of the Yellow Barn season,” Morsches says. “There are amazing audiences for the kind of music we play in Brattleboro. Sarasa intends to be part of the cultural landscape of the area.”