Web site of Bruno Procopio

Programs

• Sacred Music from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro
   

  Two programs with Les Solistes du Palais royal, designed for two chamber ensembles of 5 and 8 musicians.

  Formations:

  4 singers (SATB), 2 baroque violins, violone and organ or harpsichord.

  4 singers (SATB), organ or harpsichord.

   

  Les Solistes du Palais royal, in cooperation with a team of musicologists specializing in colonial Brazilian and Portuguese Baroque music, propose to resuscitate Portuguese and Brazilian composers little known to the general public.

   

  The program is a journey in Portuguese Sacred music, ranging from João Rodrigues Esteves, one of the most important Portuguese composers of the first half of the eighteenth century, to José Maurício Nunes Garcia. Garcia was to become one of the most respected composers of the Portugese Royal Court during his Royal sojourn in Brazil.

   

  A press kit, videos and audio concerning these programs are available on the website.

  
  
• Partitas for harpsichord – J.S.Bach, Opus 1 (1731)
   
  

  With the French Suites and the English Suites, the six Partitas for Harpsichord form Bach’s trilogy of keyboard suites. He must have thought of them as an essential part of his creative development, because he himself arranged for their publication in Leipzig between 1726 and 1731, when he compiled them and had the complete collection printed as Opus 1
  
  

  In 1731, Bach held the exhausting position of Cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. He had reached the age of forty and composed such essential works as the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, but he had not yet published any of his compositions.

  
  
  

  Although modestly titled “Exercises for the Keyboard”, the six Partitas, offered by their composer “to music lovers as refreshment for their spirits,” are works of an altogether astonishing richness and complexity. Bach’s Partitas for keyboard represent his final contribution to the dance suite form, just as this genre began to run out of steam in the face of the increasing popularity of the sonata.

  
  
• Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord – J.S.Bach
  
  

   

  Emmanuelle Guigues, viola da gamba

  
  

  Bruno Procopio, harpsichord

  
  
  

  There are no certainties concerning the date of composition of the 3 sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord by Bach. Some think they date from his stay at the court of Coethen between 1717 and 1723, the next-to-last-stop of his long career, and one of the happiest periods of his existence.  According to other sources, they would have been written in the years around 1740 at Leipzig where, from 1723 on, Bach occupied the difficult post of Cantor of Saint-Thomas.

  
  

   

  These three sonatas present very distinct characteristics of style and writing, the first two adopting the scheme of Church Sonata in the Corellian type, in four movements, and the third evoking the frame of the Italianate concerto. The harpsichord is completely emancipated, never relegated to the role of simple accompanist, the right hand of the harpsichordist being employed as a second instrumental part next to the viola da gamba, and playing an eminently concertante part. 

  
  
• Pièces de clavecin en Concerts, Jean-Phiippe Rameau
  
  

  Bruno Procopio, harpsichord

  
  

  In the whole of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s vast output, the Pièces de clavecin en Concerts are the only chamber music works he composed. They are a sort of nostalgic flashback to the solo harpsichord piece he wrote before he began composing for the stage, and all the experience ha had gained meanwhile with opera enriches their mature style.
   

  His pieces were quite new in their opposition to the Italian “Trio Sonate”, in which the harpsichord had a figured bass part and was therefore essentially the accompanist. In the Pièces de clavecin en Concerts published in France in 18^th century – often entitled “Sonata for Harpsichord, with violin (or other) accompaniment” – all the concertante instruments were given equal importance.