Baroque Ode to Joy

A memorial lies at the heart of the 17th annual Baroque Music Festival of Corona del Mar, which opens Sunday. But that won’t mean weeping and sorrow.

The festival will premiere a new work to honor Robert Sangster, a prominent Huntington Beach city attorney, music critic and longtime member of the festival board, who died in 1995 after a six-year battle with cancer.

The new work, “Cantata Jovialis” by Los Angeles composer Robert Linn, will be performed Wednesday. It was commissioned by Sangster’s widow, Kathleen, and their daughters, Suzanne and Julie.

“Kathy insisted that the work be happy to reflect the joy he always found in music,” festival director Burton Karson said in a recent interview. “So we created a text for a cantata from William Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night.’

“We also decided to have the new work on the Wednesday concert in the Sherman Library and Gardens because [Sangster] had a particular fondness for that part of the festival.”

To create the text, Karson collaborated with Kay Stanton, a colleague in the literature department at Cal State Fullerton.

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For the music, Karson turned to Robert Linn, who had composed an oboe concerto for the festival in 1993. Linn taught at USC from 1957 until his retirement in 1990.

Said Linn: “The work was designed to be a joyous and jovial and secular cantata, which is reflected in the subtitle--”In Praise of Love and Music.” It really has nothing to do with the plot of the play. It’s just an opportunity to use the poetry for a happy piece.”

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The characters include the clown Feste (soprano Linda Williams Pearce), Malvolio (countertenor Alejandro Garri), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (tenor Mark Goodrich) and Sir Toby Belch (baritone Christopher Lindbloom).

“There are solos for each of the singers, as well as duets, trios and quartets. I’ve never written for a countertenor before, but I understand [Garri] is a marvelous singer.

“Most of the time, the lines are already assigned to certain people. So I don’t have too much choice in that regard. Only a couple of times did it seem necessary to give one or another singer an opportunity to do more. There’s the famous speech, ‘Some are born great . . . ‘ I gave that to the tenor. [In the play, Malvolio says it.] It didn’t matter too much who sang it. It’s introduced at a point right after an interlude. It doesn’t disturb any story line.

“Setting the poetry was comparatively easy,” he added. “It was the dialogue that had to be edited and somehow worked with so it came out in a musical fashion.”

Accompaniment will be provided by a string quartet and a harpsichord.

Linn wrote the work in about three months, January to March. “There wasn’t a lot of revising. It seemed to flow very naturally. Burt was surprised he got it so quickly.

The piece follows “the typical format of an 18th century cantata. It alternates between recitative and arias. This way, we have some dialogue and a song. So it’s not so much a song cycle as a play within a play. It came out to 18 sections in all.”

The sections use typical Baroque music forms such as canons, fugues and variations. “It just came out that way. It was natural since I was writing in a tonal style to make use of those forms. It’s tonal in style, but there’s a lot of spicy harmonies and melodic twists and certainly syncopated rhythms to bring it into our time. But there are a lot of good tunes in it.”

* The 17th annual Baroque Music Festival of Corona del Mar will open with a concert of Baroque concertos Sunday at 4 p.m. at St. Michael and All Angels Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive, Newport Beach. $25. The Festival will continue: Monday with an organ recital at 8 p.m. at St. Michael ($10); choral and instrumental programs Wednesday and Friday at Sherman Library and Gardens, 2645 E. Coast Highway ($30 each), and a chorale finale next Sunday at 4 p.m. at St. Michael ($25). Information: (714) 760-7887.