Third Thursday: Annette Richards & David Yearsley

“The Woods So Wild” — music of birds, forests, gardens and more by Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, Byrd, Bull and contemporaries – and some poetry.

How can the organ, that wondrous mechanical marvel, envoice nature? In this program we hear the organ’s music reanimate the sounds of the natural world — the rumble of thunder and the crack of lightning, the lilting hum of the forest, and the whisper of falling leaves, the trills of the nightingale, and the persistent call of the cuckoo — in works by William Byrd, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Alessandro Poglietti and others. There is no wood without woods, and without habitat there are no birds: these tautologies are implicit in our rendition of 19th-century Rochester organist Henry Russell’s ballad “Woodman! Spare that Tree.” Through these same fields and forests, Monteverdi’s Orfeo will consort with his fellow non-humans, pausing to admire a 17th-century curiosity, a burnished piece of “Coral” — we’ll hear variations on the popular song of that name in the manner of Johan Schop. These sounds all await in the Cabinet of Curiosities that is the Rochester Art Gallery’s wondrous Italian organ, that marvelous collaboration between human artifice and materials taken from the earth. This miraculous construct sings across the centuries—a message all the more powerful and urgent today as the beauty and balance of the natural world vanish.