10 Aug Notes on the Program: The Poet & The Prodigy
On Saturday, September 19, 2026 at 7:30 pm at Treelawn Music Hall (15335 Waterloo Rd. Cleveland, OH 44110), Les Délices will kick off its 2026-27 season with a FREE performance of The Poet & The Prodigy!
Our signature The Poet & the Prodigy program is reimagined to include music by CPE Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann alongside Baroque-era titans François Couperin and J.S. Bach. Click here to reserve your free/pay-what-you-can ticket.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
As an oboist, Johann Sebastian Bach’s chamber music, cantatas, and concertos have been a cornerstone of my repertoire since my earliest days–but I only encountered the music of François Couperin when I began to play the baroque oboe. Since then, music by both Couperin and Bach has been a constant companion, continually inspiring and challenging me.
While Bach’s music – embodying his penchant for counterpoint, rigor, symbolism, and virtuosity – might seem to be diametrically opposed to French sensibilities, I find the juxtaposition deeply satisfying. In pairing music by Bach & Couperin, we create an opportunity to consider their common influences and appreciate their unique approaches to expression and musical rhetoric.
While we’ll never really know if these great artists ever met, their careers followed similar trajectories for a time. Both men were revered organists and neither ever wrote or experimented with opera. Each also spent their early careers focused primarily on chamber music: Couperin served as Ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du roi pour le clavecin from 1717 while Bach served the music-loving Prince Leopold (1717-1721) in Cöthen, where he composed most of his chamber music.
Furthermore, both Bach and Couperin studied and incorporated Italian style into their works. For Couperin, the sonatas and trios of Arcangelo Corelli were a major influence whose effects can be heard in his walking bass lines, burgeoning interest in imitative, abstract counterpoint, and more virtuosic flourishes. For Bach, copying and imitating concertos by Vivaldi and others would deeply affect his output as he incorporated Italian trademarks like concerto ritornello form, driving rhythms, and unison writing into his musical language.
But it wasn’t just Italian style that Bach internalized: he was clearly familiar with French keyboard composers. Besides performing Louis Marchand’s harpsichord suites “ingeniously” and “from memory” in Dresden in 1717, Bach copied out Couperin’s own Les Bergeries in Anna Magdalena’s music book (given to her in early 1722) and had previously arranged the F major rondeau from Couperin’s trio sonata L’Imperiale for organ (BWV 587) around 1714.
For this performance, we’ve also included several tributes to Couperin & Bach’s legacies. We’ll hear lutenist Robert de Visée famous transcription of Couperin’s haunting harpsichord solo Les Sylvains while viol player Antoine Forqueray offers a character portrait that’s full of pathos and gravity with La Couperin. Although Bach’s prowess as an improviser and organist was very much admired, many of his contemporaries felt that his rigorous and complex musical style was already outmoded. The future of music (at least for 18th century composers) would be driven by melody rather than counterpoint as Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s sonata for oboe demonstrates. We close our program by contrasting Bach’s riveting Fuga canonica in epidiapente (canonic fugue at the interval of a fifth) from The Musical Offering BWV 1079 with several movements from Scherzi Melodichi by Georg Philipp Telemann, whose joyous music truly embodied an international style.
– Debra Nagy