Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has taken The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres on a four-city tour of California and Missouri, January 30 to February 6.  Stops on the tour include Kansas City, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Los Angeles.  The 2010 U.S. tour follows prestigious debuts at New York’s Carnegie Hall in February 2009, the inaugural Reate Festival in Italy last summer, and an October appearance at the Cervantino International Festival in Mexico.

The project has been nominated as Canada’s entry in the International Year of Astronomy’s 2009 Prize for Excellence in Astronomy Education and Public Outreach. The winners will be recognized in March 2010 at a ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa. In November 2009 The Galileo Project was the subject of a feature article in Hubble Space Telescope’s CAP Journal (Communicating Astronomy to the Public), and was the December 2009 cover story for International Arts Manager, a UK publication. In April 2009, the International Astronomical Union named an asteroid after Tafelmusik. Looking ahead to October 2010, The Galileo Project travels to Asia and Tafelmusik will make its debut in Kuala Lumpur. A Mandarin-language version of the project is being prepared for the Chinese stops on Tafelmusik’s tour itinerary.

To listen to Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in Mozart’s final two symphonies…

Because images and music speak louder than words, a video of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, as performed live by the Orchestre de la Francophonie, under the direction of Jean-Philippe Tremblay.

Anton Schindler recounted how when he was walking with Beethoven in April 1823, the latter “often stopped, looking around in wonder and breathing in the fragrant air of that marvelous valley. Then, sitting on the turf, and leaning against an elm, he asked me if, among the birdsongs, I could distinguish that of the oriole. Everything was quiet. He spoke up again: ‘Here I wrote the ‘Scene by the brook’ and up there, the quails, the orioles and the nightingales and the cuckoos composed it before me.’ ”

A thunderstorm soon cuts short the “Joyous gathering of peasants”, with its popular sounds. “Listen to the gusts of wind gorged with rain, the dull growl of the basses, the shrill hissing of piccolos announcing the fearful storm that is about the break out,” Berlioz explains. “ The hurricane approaches and increases in intensity. A huge chromatic scale, starting in the upper instruments, plunges to the depths of the orchestra, picks up the basses on the way, drags them upwards, like a surging whirlwind that sweeps everything in its way.”

The Symphony ends in joy and serenity, the bucolic images for the first movement once again conjured up in this hymn of gratitude to nature.

To listen to the Third Symphony, as performed by the Orchestre de la Francophonie under the direction of Jean-Philippe Tremblay (CD 3)

“I love a tree more than a man: woods, trees and rocks give man the response he needs.” (Beethoven)

According to his contemporaries, Beethoven loved nothing more than to immerse himself in the beauties of nature. His servant Michael Krenn remembered that he could roam up and down the fields from dawn to nightfall, “sketchbook in hand, waving his arms, completely carried away by inspiration.” One of these notebooks, dated 1803, in fact contains a musical sketch of the sounds of the brook flowing near Heiligenstadt (close to Vienna), a passage that will be reworked in order to incorporate it in the Andante of the “Pastoral.”

Composed simultaneously, the Fifth Symphony and the “Pastoral” were premiered 22 December 1808. If the former depicts man grappling with Fate, the latter finds him facing Nature. Rather than drawing up a realistic portrait of the scenes conjured up, Beethoven seeks rather to extract their quintessence. “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life, (more an expression of feeling than painting)”, he wrote, in fact,  on the title page of the first edition.

The first movement suggested the following images to Hector Berlioz: “The shepherds begin to move about nonchalantly in the fields; their pipes can be heard from a distance and close-by. Exquisite sounds caress you like the scented morning breeze. A flight or rather swarms of twittering birds pass overhead, and the atmosphere occasionally feels laden with mists. Heavy clouds come to hide the sun, then suddenly they scatter and let floods of dazzling light fall straight down on the fields and the woods.”

To listen to the Third Symphony, as performed by the Orchestre de la Francophonie under the direction of Jean-Philippe Tremblay (CD 3)