Hailed internationally for his “colourful, kinetic performances,” Hank Knox performs on harpsichord in concert halls, churches, museums, galleries and homes around the globe. A founding member of Montreal’s Arion Baroque Orchestra, with whom he has toured North and South America, Europe and Japan, Knox has also performed, recorded and toured with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Les Violons du Roy and l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, among other groups, ensembles and orchestras. He has released a number of acclaimed recordings on rare antique instruments as well as copies of historical instruments including discs devoted to Scarlatti, Bach, Frescobaldi, Geminiani and Handel. During his time teaching in the Early Music program at McGill University, he conducted the McGill Baroque Orchestra and directed a great number of Baroque operas for Opera McGill, including Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Monteverdi’s Poppea and Handel’s Orlando, Agrippina, Giulio Cesare, Alcina and Rinaldo; he is currently involved in coachings with the Atelier Lyrique programme at the Opéra de Montréal for a production of Monteverdi’s Poppea. He produced a wildly eclectic programme featuring the music of Bach, Handel, Stravinsky, Leonard Cohen, Frescobaldi, Robert Charlebois and Frank Zappa (and more) for CBC’s, This is My Music; it can be heard at https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-382-this-is-my-music/clip/15934291-this-is-my-music-september-3-2022-.
This programme explores some of the most extravagant and playful music for harpsichord from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It opens with three kinetic sonatas from Domenico Scarlatti’s only published collection of sonatas (which he called ‘an ingenious Jesting with Art’ ), and continues with several inventive pieces by Roman composer Girolamo Frescobaldi, including an extended fantasy on the call of the Cuckoo, a flamboyant set of variations on a ground bass by his contemporary Bernardo Storace, and closes with a richly-inspired synthesis of all of those styles, J.S. Bach’s celebrated Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. -H.K.
This concert is a proud community co-presentation with the CHAMBER MUSE historical music society of Calgary.
This concert is the second in a series of four “Distinctive Artists” Concerts during 2024 that is generously sponsored by:
