Grammy Award winners Apollo’s Fire and Jeannette Sorrell present three enthralling concerts during their first London residency at St-Martin-in-the-Fields (15-17 April 2023)
Programme offers fresh insights into Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a late-night baroque jam session with Blues Café 1610, and Exile & Resilience, a heart-melting bill of Ashkenazi Jewish and African diasporic songs and dances
Cleveland-based early music ensemble’s eagerly awaited UK tour also includes Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered Sunday matinee at Snape Maltings

Apollo’s Fire is set to return to London after an absence of almost eight years this spring for its first ever UK residency at St-Martin-in-the-Fields (Saturday 15 - Monday 17 April 2023). The Grammy Award-winning ensemble, among North America’s finest period instrument groups, will also make a whistlestop visit to Snape Maltings for a Sunday matinee performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (16 April). The London residency opens with a compelling exploration of the literary and musical imagery of The Four Seasons, performed in company with soloist Francisco Fullana and directed from the harpsichord by Apollo’s Fire founder and Artistic Director, Jeannette Sorrell. It continues with Blues Café 1610, a late-night date in the crypt of St Martin’s, and concludes with Exile & Resilience, a rich mix of music from the Jewish and African diasporas.

“We’re coming to London to have a party with our audience,” comments Jeannette Sorrell. “We’ll begin at St Martin’s with The Four Seasons Rediscovered and move into the Crypt for our Blues Café 1610. And we’ll continue the theme of discovery and rediscovery with Exile & Resilience, our tour of Ashkenazi Jewish and African music. We are particularly excited to bring one of our multicultural programmes to the UK for the first time, fresh from a big US tour including concerts in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Baroque music has always been about influencing moods and taking listeners on an emotional journey. We aim to do just that in London and at Snape Maltings and hope that people will leave feeling better than when they arrived for the concert.”

Apollo’s Fire received a coveted Grammy Award in 2019 for Songs of Orpheus, an album of arias, songs and instrumental pieces by Monteverdi, Caccini and others recorded with the Lebanese American tenor Karim Sulayman. It has since scored rave reviews for O Jerusalem!, a live recording of music from the Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian quarters of Jerusalem, and for its revelatory account of The Four Seasons. The ensemble, which recently added a Chicago residency to its existing series in and around its home in Cleveland, Ohio, secured its international reputation with regular European tours and an extensive discography on the Avie label. The signing of a new partnership with Medici.tv promises to broaden the reach of its critically acclaimed work.

Since last visiting London in 2015 to perform at the BBC Proms, Apollo’s Fire has expanded its repertoire to embrace European folk and world music traditions. The development mirrors Jeannette Sorrell’s original intention to create a group in tune with the highly expressive language of baroque music and more recent personal discoveries about her father’s Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. The harpsichordist and conductor underlines the importance to Apollo’s Fire of communicating directly with its audience by projecting the powerful emotions of pre-Classical music. “Engaging with and speaking to the audience, which is something we’ve done for so long, seems to us like a normal way of making music,” observes Sorrell. “Most of our concerts contain a storytelling element that’s part of connecting with people and stirring emotions. That was what baroque music was always about.”

Storytelling is central to Exile & Resilience. The latest Apollo’s Fire programme, conceived and directed by Jeannette Sorrell, represents a natural progression from O Jerusalem!. Jewish, Palestinian and African American guest artists, the UK-based specialists in Yiddish song and klezmer Merlin and Polina Shepherd among them, will join Apollo’s Fire on tour. The concert’s overarching theme holds profound personal significance for its creator, who only discovered the details of her father’s true identity four years ago.

Sorrell and her family had always believed that her father had come to the United States after the Second World War as an orphaned migrant from Switzerland. When she considered applying for a Swiss passport to make travelling around Europe easier, she asked her father for his immigration papers but was told that he had lost them many years before. A search of Ancestry.com delivered instant access to his US naturalisation certificate, which revealed his Hungarian-sounding, possibly Jewish birthname. After a DNA test showed her genetic heritage to be 50% Ashkenazi Jewish, she proceeded to visit the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington. There she discovered that her father had been deported at the age of thirteen, together with his parents, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Sorrell’s grandmother was murdered and her father and grandfather were put to work before being transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp.

Sorrell’s paternal family came from Oradea in Northern Transylvania. The city’s Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. To deal with the psychological trauma as a survivor of the Holocaust, Sorrell’s father chose to close that chapter in his life, leave Europe and create a new identity unrelated to his past.

“Exile & Resilience is directly inspired by my father’s story,” notes Jeannette Sorrell. “He’s an exile who was imprisoned in secrets he was unable to share with anyone. Since those secrets came out, he has opened up and become much sunnier. I hope this concert, which is unfortunately very timely, will make everyone think about how we interact with migrants and refugees. There are more refugees in the world today than ever before, according to the UN. The point of the concert is to show how music of different cultures, even those that now hold great enmity between them, once influenced each other at a particular moment in time, when people sat down to eat together, to talk together and to make music together. They blossomed because of that mutual influence.”

The Four Seasons, as interpreted by Apollo’s Fire, tells another compelling human story. The ensemble’s recording with Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana, chosen by The Sunday Times as one of its ‘10 Best Classical Albums of 2021’, evokes the vibrancy and vitality of Venetian scenes painted by Canaletto and the colour of life depicted by Vivaldi in his quartet of concertos and the sonnets on which they are based. “The way we present the work in concert is very different from how it is usually experienced,” comments Jeannette Sorrell. “I explain to people at the beginning that The Four Seasons is not just about the weather! Vivaldi was describing the world of the contadini, the Italian peasants of the 18th century, who lived and breathed and celebrated with the changing of the seasons.”

Sorrell and her companions preface each concerto with a preview of the unfolding seasonal story. “The players demonstrate some of pictorial effects while I’m telling the tale that Vivaldi included in his sonnets. Together these provide listeners with guideposts along the way. After each of our performances across the United States, so many audience members will say that they thought they knew these pieces well but realised they never knew them until now. I hope our Four Seasons Rediscovered concerts will give our audiences in London and Snape a new understanding of Vivaldi’s concertos.”

Blues Café 1610 offers a musical tour of 17th century pubs and taverns, including dances and party pieces by Marco Uccellini and Tarquinio Merula, folk melodies from John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651), and traditional early 17th century, Celtic and Mediterranean fiddle tunes. Apollo’s Fire players, including singing troubadour/lutenist Brian Kay and hammered dulcimer virtuoso Tina Bergmann, will use early 17th-century ground basses as the platform for colourful improvisations. “The Playford tunes are, I think, very much like what you would have heard in a London pub in the 1660s,” observes Jeannette Sorrell. “Any of the Blues Café partygoers who want to make the trip to Suffolk, can join us the following day for Vivaldi at Snape Maltings and then return to St Martin’s on the Monday to hear the three sides of what Apollo’s Fire does.”

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Saturday 15 April 2023, 7pm
St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London
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Jeannette Sorrell artistic director | Francisco Fullana violin | René Schiffer cello | Mimé Yamahiro Brinkmann cello | Apollo’s Fire

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered:
Uccellini (arr. Sorrell) La Bergamasca
Vivaldi The Four Seasons
Vivaldi Concerto for Two Cellos in G minor, RV 531
Vivaldi (arr. Sorrell) Concerto Grosso, ‘La Folia’

Saturday 15 April 2023, 9pm
Crypt of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London
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Jeannette Sorrell artistic director | Apollo’s Fire

Blues Café 1610

Sunday 16 April 2023, 4pm
Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk
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Jeannette Sorrell artistic director | Francisco Fullana violin | Apollo’s Fire

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered:
Vivaldi Concerto No.1 in E major ‘Spring’
Vivaldi Concerto No.2 in G minor ‘Summer’
Vivaldi Concerto No.3 in F major ‘Autumn’
Vivaldi Concerto No.4 in F minor ‘Winter’

Monday 17 April 2023, 7.30pm
St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London
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Jeannette Sorrell artistic director | Polina Skovoroda Shepherd soprano | Haitham Haidar tenor | Jeffrey Strauss baritone | Daphna Mor recorder, ney, vocals | Merlin Shepherd clarinet | Apollo’s Singers | Apollo’s Fire

Exile & Resilience – Music of the Jewish & African Diasporas