Bach Society Houston, Kyle Stegall Present ‘Majestic’ Christmas Oratorio, Celebrate ‘The Spirit Within’
Dec. 7, 2022
ON SATURDAY, DEC. 10, Bach Society Houston (BSH) celebrates the Christmas season and its 40th anniversary with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, an alternately majestic and intimate retelling of the nativity of Jesus.
The six-part oratorio, with each part originally conceived to be performed on the major feast days of the Christmas season, is an expansive, lavishly scored work for full orchestra, chorus, and soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists. BSH will be performing the first three cantatas on Dec. 10.
Missouri-based tenor Kyle Stegall is back in Houston by popular demand to sing the role of the evangelist, who narrates the gospel throughout the oratorio with declamatory recitatives and melisma-filled arias. The performance takes place at Rice University’s new Brockman Hall for Opera in the beautifully designed Lucian and Nancy Morrison Theater, a 600-seat, three-tiered, European-style opera theater with an orchestra pit big enough to handle the large number of instruments this oratorio requires. BSH director Rick Erickson conducts.
“Bach writes at the very edge of possibility,” says Stegall of the composer’s propensity to exploit the full range and technical potential of every instrument in the oratorio, including the voice. “It’s all somehow made expressively valid by the fact that I am constantly telling a story, and that story always exists in the melody as well as the ensemble.”
While Stegall’s repertoire includes plenty of other Baroque masterpieces, as well as Romantic-era lieder and contemporary opera, the music of Bach holds a special place in his heart. Stegall and his wife Holly Piccoli, a Baroque violinist, celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in Leipzig, where Bach composed hundreds of cantatas, despite the many tragedies he experienced. “No matter what was happening in his life and in his world, he always translated the spirit within him by putting ink to paper,” says Stegall.
The holidays are an especially busy time for historically informed musicians, and Stegall and Piccoli are no exception. They are currently on different tours, each performing different Christmas concerts until Dec. 22 when they return home to enjoy some “mediative time for the season.”
“I look forward to that just as much as I look forward to sharing this storytelling with audiences,” says Stegall.
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Beautiful Pianist Who Gave Bedside Concerts to Isolated Covid Patients Says Music Is Medicine
Dec. 7, 2022
FOR AWARD-WINNING concert pianist Mei Rui, who serves as an artist collaborator at Rice University, music is both an aesthetic pleasure and medicine for healing the body and mind.
“Since the pandemic, for every concert I’ve programmed, I’ve tried to focus on the element of human connection,” says Rui. She describes her upcoming Dec. 10 concert at Rice University with her friend and colleague pianist Michael Bukhman as “a feast.” There’s a selection of four-hand and two-piano pieces “for every taste bud,” including classics by Schubert and Rachmaninoff, and a brand new composition by Texas composer Till Meyn titled Ascendant Grooves.
The variety of the program reflects Rui’s research into how different styles of classical music engage different regions of the listener’s brain and provide quantifiable neurophysiological benefits. “There’s so much overlap between science, medicine, and music,” says Rui, who founded the MUSICARE (Musicians United for Service in Care) initiative with the Houston Symphony, which facilitated virtual and live bedside music performances for otherwise isolated ICU patients during the Covid-19 pandemic. In February, she will join the department of neurosurgery at MD Anderson as an assistant professor and director of music medicine.
Although Rui and Bukhman have known each other for 20 years, the Dec. 10 concert will be the first time they’ve played together onstage for an audience. “He’s an incredible artist, and a deep musician,” says Rui of Bukhman. Whether seated on the same bench for Schubert’s kaleidoscopic Fantasie in F Minor or seated face-to-face at dueling grands for Meyn’s driving Ascendant Grooves, an almost psychic rapport between the pianists is essential for creating a captivating performance. “You need that openness and complete flow of conversation,” says Rui. “The other person needs to be very receptive and sensitive to nuanced changes through sound, movement and subtle cues.”
Mei Rui
Michael Bukhman
Born in China, Rui majored at Yale University in music and molecular biochemistry and biophysics and remains passionate about the health benefits of listening to classical music. While at Houston Methodist, as part of her research into the impact of music intervention on acute-care surgeons’ burnout, sleep, and stress, Rui curated and recorded a Surgeons' Music Intervention on Sleep and Stress Study Playlist, a sort of mixtape for self-medication with solo piano pieces by Brahms, Bach, and Chopin. Next year, she plans to publish that study’s fMRI imaging and actigraphy results which show how music, when carefully selected for the patient by a professional musician with a thorough knowledge of classical repertoire, can be powerful modulator of the human stress response. “It’s my hope that in 10 or 20 years, instead of reaching for Ambien or Prozac, people will reach for a Chopin Nocturne,” says Rui.
And speaking as a mother, Rui notes the playlist definitely has its intended, quantifiable effect on her four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son. “It really knocks them out,” laughs Rui.
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