On the evening of Sunday, July 15, the Westminster Choir College in Princeton played as the host to the French Baroque concert, ‘Les Agréments de Musique,’ at the Bristol Chapel on the school’s campus.
The French Baroque concert has been an annual performance held at the Bristol Chapel every summer since 2013.
Led by John Burkhalter (recorders), Minju Lee (harpsichord) and Abigail Chapman (soprano), the group played works from Jean-Baptiste Lully, Élizabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, Michel L’Affilard and Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
The ensemble, which was originally just a duo, came about ten years ago after Burkhalter and Lee met for the first time.
“The birth of, ‘Les Agréments De Musique’ took place when Minju and I had the opportunity to meet for the first time,” said Burkhalter. “It was actually at a program that didn’t involve French music at all, but 17th-century Dutch music. We were doing a program that was involved with a lot of mutual friends and colleagues. Our chemistry was just spot-on. We didn’t know much about each other. I had some brief background knowledge of her and she had the same for me, and I knew that she was a very fine harpsichordist and she knew that I knew my way around a recorder. So, there was no agenda other than get together and just playing.”
The two were asked to consider playing music that had a very difficult repertoire to it and the average musician couldn’t just sit down and start playing.
“It looks very simple and unadventurous on the page, but to bring it to life, you have to have a background in historic performance practice that will allow you to infuse the musical mind with its body,” he said. “And we did this with such ease, that we just looked at each other and said, ‘This is so unbelievable.’ The chemistry is just so perfect for us. So, we thought we should just form an ensemble.”
After realizing that they were both interested in playing French Baroque style of music, the two of them were met with the same task the they had recently faced. Would they be able to take on such a harrowing venture of an older style of music?
“We got together to read through some pieces, and it was so easy to work with each other,” he said. “French music is just so elusive in terms of modern performance. It looks very uncomplicated on the page, but it is hugely complicated. There’s a poetry and a rhetorical underpinning to the music that you must know to play. I know there is a language and a poetry to the music, and Minju is very conscious of the musical language and the musical rhetoric. So, between the two of us, the music just leaps off the page in a felicitous way.”
Lee seemed to share the same thoughts as Burkhalter on their undertaking into such a difficult style of music.
“We didn’t know each other but we played together, and we didn’t say anything, we just played, and our chemistry was just so good,” she said. “Since that time, we have been working together.”
Lee came to America from Korea to study music at Stony Brook University in New York. After hearing someone play the harpsichord, Lee was immediately entranced by the sound.
Already knowing how to play the keyboard, the transition over to the harpsichord was pretty easy for Lee. She eventually changed her major to the instrument and received her master’s degree from Stony Brook.
“I was very interested in keyboard music, and once I found out about harpsichord, there was some improvisation, but with my musical composition background, it was very natural for me to change over,” Lee said.
Burkhalter and Lee have been playing music together for the last 10 years and performing at the Westminster Choir College for the last six years.
But it wasn’t until this year that the duo became a trio.
Moving to the area about a year and a half ago with her husband, Abagail Chapman, a singer known for her opera and oratorio style, met Burkhalter through a mutual friend.
During the last holiday season, Chapman and Burkhalter played some French carols together and realized how much harmony they had together.
“That was when we sort of knew that we had this chemistry,” Chapman said. “Our ornamentation was in sync and we really enjoyed making music together.”
Burkhalter invited Chapman to perform with him and Lee at a music festival this past March, it was there where they created the first-half of what they would play at the Westminster Choir College.
“My first performance with them was at the ‘Grounds for Sculpture Early Music Festival’ in March and that’s a twenty to thirty-minute program and we used that for the first half of this program,” she said. “John is such an encyclopedia for this sort of repertoire, he just knew everything that he wanted to pull together to make this program at full-length.”
Chapman, who grew up in Maine, has been singing since the time she could talk.
Belonging to a Baptist church with her family, Chapman witnessed both of her parents as well as her grandmother sing in the church choir.
Her mother sang to her every night before going to sleep and at age four, Chapman started to begin singing back to her mother. By the time she was six years old, Chapman had her own solo in the church choir.
Eventually joining a semi-professional choir that did a mixture of early music and new music, Chapman fell in love with early music.
“That continued through college,” Chapman said. “I lived in New York for six years and did a lot of early music there. I moved out to Denver, Colorado, in 2007 and found there is a vibrant and growing scene of early music there.”
After going to the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland to get her master’s degree, Chapman made sure to take almost every course revolving around early music.
“Every early music thing that I could fit into my schedule, I took,” she said. “I sing other things as well, but I really love being a specialist in early music.”
Playing as a trio for the first time at Westminster Choir College, the ensemble made sure that their synchronization was like none other.
Burkhalter felt that the community of Princeton is such great home for their ensemble, he would never fail to provide music for them.
“I am happy to play music and promote early music activity,” Burkhalter said. “This is a fantastic community for this repertory and as long as I breathe, I am going to put air into my flutes and play music.”
