Ives Collective patio concert – Stuck at Home with Handel

Our decades of vagabonding summers came to a sudden halt with Covid-19. Like you, our plans for adventure remained only plans. No music festivals in stunning places, no flying as a family somewhere tropical… (I don’t have to tell you!) But we had to get away a little, even if it meant just a drive north to Calistoga. It was so nice to get out of our house! And we found a nice patio to record on with our son doing the recording over his phone. No multiple camera angles, no acoustic engineering – just a slice of our musical lives in Covid times. At the time, getting music out of the Stanford library was impossible and even the chance of getting into my studio had been suspended, so we went with what we had available, an edition of Handel’s violin sonatas with continuo. What a fun discovery!

Over the past 200+ years some of these sonatas have become recital repertoire for violinists, usually with piano accompaniment. (It is amazing how many of the big name solists recorded a select few. You can find recordings online by Milstein, Stern and Szeryng, etc.)

But, of course, that is not how they were heard in Handel’s time. The first edition score (available on imslp) shows two lines, one the treble line and the other the bass. The little numbers over the bass line are what is called figured bass, used by accompanying keyboard players to “manufacture” an accompaniment with chords whose notes are “stacked” in a certain order. For example, a G minor chord whose notes are G-Bb-D might be played with any one of those notes as the lowest note of the chord, as in Bb-D-G, depending upon those little numbers. And it would not have been unusual to have no keyboard at all, just as we are playing it here.

Music has been a great tool to keep us from going crazy in lockdown, so we thought we’d share. We are sure the musicians among you have found music to be tremendous solace. We know you are stuck at home too – or, at least, close to home.

These won’t be the last “stuck at home” videos we will send out. We hope you enjoy!

Calistoga recordings

Georg Friedrich Händel – Sonata in G minor, Op.1, No. 10, 1732

Movement 1:

Movement 2: