Tafelmusik: Restoring Dance to Rameau

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Tafelmusik puts on its party shoes when it presents Rameau and the Art of Dance this month (February). Internationally-acclaimed baroque violinist Robert Mealy, artistic director of The Juilliard School’s historical performance program, leads a program of French baroque suites spotlighting Rameau’s magnificent operas.

The Berkeley, Calif.-born performer and teacher is director of the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, principal concertmaster for Trinity Wall Street’s baroque orchestra, as well as co-director of the chamber group Quicksilver.

For its Rameau program, Tafelmusik musicians will be joined by 15 string and wind players from Juilliard415, the school’s principal period-instrument ensemble founded in 2009. Their moniker is inspired by the A=415 pitch at which baroque music is usually played. Baroque dancers Caroline Copeland and Julian Donahue are also featured. All share a common artistic language with Mealy leading from his violin.

The cross-border project had its genesis a year ago. Tafelmusik co-director and principal bassoonist Dominic Theresi teaches with Mealy at Juilliard. He approached the violinist with a desire to celebrate his colleague’s longstanding ties between the school and the Toronto-based ensemble.

Robert Mealy
Photo: Rosalie O’Connor Photography

“Dominic thought it would be fantastic for [Juilliard] students to play side-by-side with Tafelmusik’s complement of musicians, which is particularly great since so many of our players have already worked with these top players through their summer programs,” says Mealy.“It’s so inspiring for students to be able to sit next to professionals working at the highest level and play this music, with a really fabulous, large orchestra, that is wonderful and all too rare.”

Mealy’s Tafelmusik connection is even more personal. He performed “off and on” with the group for eight years after being invited to join them while an undergraduate at Harvard.

“It’s actually very touching for me to be performing onstage with this ensemble again after so many years,” says Mealy. “The first program I did with them was with a very influential Belgian violinist named Sigiswald Kuijken, one of the first people to really discover what it means to play baroque violin as a different instrument than modern violin. And he came with a program that included a suite of Rameau’s, which was the first time I had ever done that. Those were very, very, very important years for me.”

The impact of that seminal concert inspired Mealy to include several of the same Rameau works in Tafelmusik’s latest program.

“Rameau has written some of the music that is most important to me—that has really been immensely inspiring. It’s so wonderfully tuneful, and with such rich musical textures,” says Mealy. “I also think he’s the most kinetic composer before Stravinsky, with choreographers at the time saying, ‘Rameau taught us how to dance,’ because his music invited its own choreography.”

Dancers Donahue and Copeland will bring two orchestral suites, Rameau’s Naïs (1749), and Dardanus (1739), to choreographic life. These pieces are comprised of typical baroque dance forms such as menuets, gavottes, and passepieds.

Mealy draws particular attention to the stately chaconnes that conclude each of the suites. “It’s the most expansive dance form because it always represents the restoration of order at the end of an opera, and it’s a form Rameau uses in particularly theatrical ways. So that will be very exciting to see what they come up with for that,” he says of the dancers with whom he’s worked extensively at the Boston Early Music Festival.

Those expecting traditional 18th-century period costumes might be surprised that the dancers will also don contemporary garb.

Mealy assures that the inclusion of modern costuming is au courant with current trends in historical performance practice as it adapts to our more culturally sensitive times. The movement is trying to contextualize baroque art for 21st-century audiences by a reimagining of musical conventions, including celebrating diversity in repertoire. This Tafelmusik program has been thoughtfully curated to provide an accessible, contemporary reference point for the audience before whisking everyone back in time to the 18th century.

Following its Toronto run, the full cohort of Canadian and American artists will present the program at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on Feb. 27. A final performance takes place on March 1 at First Church in Cambridge, Mass., as part of Boston Early Music Festival.

“We’re so accustomed to hearing these baroque suites performed solely as instrumental works,” says Mealy, adding: “However, dance is so crucial for making these pieces come alive. We’re bringing music back into the body again.”