This feature is written by Laila Freeman, an Orange County freelance writer with a BA in journalism from Cal State Long Beach. She is working on a master of fine arts in creative writing at Chapman University. This feature is underwritten by the Journalism Arts Initiative.
Love keeps them together, but their flourishing music careers sometimes push them apart.
Oboist Gonzalo X. Ruiz and violinist Tatiana Daubek will be on stage for Musica Angelica’s Vivaldi Il Veneziano concerts April 20 in Long Beach and April 21 in Los Angeles, and their 6-year-old daughter, Sofia, will be in town with them. It doesn’t always work out that smoothly.
“I’ve spent so much time away from home the last 30 some years,” Ruiz said in a Zoom interview. “Between 30 and 40 percent of the year, I sleep somewhere else. There was a time when she also did a lot of touring. So anytime we can work together is good. As I’m getting older, that’s going to start slowing down. It just doesn’t seem as much fun as it used to be to get on airplanes.”
Originally from Argentina, Ruiz has been principal oboist for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. He joined Musica Angelica, based in Long Beach, in 1992 and is the associate music director. He will be conducting the Baroque ensemble in the Vivaldi concerts.
He and his wife are flying in for the concerts from New York, where the family lives and where he teaches at the Juilliard School. Daubek is the granddaughter of Jarmila Novotná, a renowned Czech soprano, and has toured in North and South America. Both are members of the New York quartet House of Time, which, like Musica Angelica, specializes in older music played on period instruments.
Ruiz has multiple roles in the Musica Angelica concerts. In addition to conducting while at the same time playing either oboe or guitar in the ensemble, he will be the soloist in one of the pieces, an oboe concerto. He also picked some of the music for the concert, did arrangements and even had to write some of it.
“The oboe concerto is the flashiest of all the surviving oboe concertos, so I thought that might be a good fit to go with ‘The Four Seasons,’ ” he said. “I will be at the front of the orchestra with a 17th century guitar in my hand, conducting and queuing as needed for ‘The Four Seasons.’ That piece doesn’t need much standard orchestral conducting.”
He thinks the audience might be surprised when it hears Vivaldi’s most popular composition.
“What I did for this show is arrange it for the whole orchestra. That meant writing a new viola part and then handing out solos so that everybody in the orchestra is going to do them. ‘The Four Seasons’ is basically about the two violinists that are going to be soloists, one in each of the four concertos. Then I have my own, and we’re going to end with everybody. I might just point to people on stage — you next, you next — like they do in jazz. You never know when you will get the finger and now it’s time for you to play a solo.”
Ruiz also plays in jazz groups, and he said the finale of the concert will sound even more like jazz.
“We’re finishing with a piece called ‘La Folia,’ he said, “which is not really a piece. It’s not even a tune. ‘La Folia’ was kind of like the 17th century equivalent of a 12-bar blues, a harmonic sequence that everybody knows. There’s some variation, but basically, it’s just like any two people who can play music, if they don’t know any tunes in common, they can still play the blues.
“ ‘La Folia’ sort of filled that role. There are lots of carefully prepared, written-out versions, and it’s also a basis for improvisation. Vivaldi has a really good one.”
Musicians in Baroque concerts have similar creative liberties to jazz musicians, Ruiz explained.
“People have a lot more leeway to ornament, add their own stuff, especially in slower bits. At this concert you’ll hear the other soloists and I do things that aren’t exactly on the page, but it’s on the level of surface details. It’s not like the entire part is up to you.”
Ruiz changes his instrumental mindset depending on whether he’s playing the oboe or guitar.
“The oboe is all about horizontality like a violin. There’s some verticality on a violin – you can play some chords. But oboe is all about the line.
“A guitar is mostly about the harmony. When I play jazz, a lot of that is about lines. But when I’m playing in a baroque orchestra, I’m like an extra right hand of the harpsichord. That’s the best way to describe it.”
The two instruments also have different freedoms.
“On the oboe, I usually know pretty much exactly what I’m going to do, especially with something busy and written out like the Vivaldi concerto,” Ruiz said. “Whereas when I play a guitar in this kind of setting, I’m looking at the same music that the cello has, but I don’t play those notes. I just use them for information to play the harmonies wherever I want or wherever I can. It’s not prescribed.”
For Ruiz and Daubek, bringing their daughter with them to California “adds a layer of excitement” to their performance. “I’m just amazed that all these decades later, I’m still coming back to Musica Angelica,” Ruiz said. “It’s always fun, and Tatiana always starts fantasizing about what it would be like to live on the West Coast.”
Vivaldi Il Veneziano, concert by Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra will take place Saturday, April 20, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Long Beach at 241 Cedar Ave.
A second show will take place Sunday, April 21, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles (Shatto): 540 S. Commonwealth Ave., Los Angeles
Tickets range from $40 to $80, and are available at https://www.musicaangelica.org/. Call 562-276-0865 for information.
