The King’s Noyse: Le Jardin de Mélodies

Anne Kazlauskas writes:

I will just say right now that The King’s Noyse opened things with a bang.
Ellen Hargis sounded a little tired at times (probably hasn’t been sleeping
much since she got here 3 weeks ago) but sang with her silvery tone & total
concentration, looking relaxed & having fun (ditto the rest), then closed with
the heartrending anonymous lament of Elizabeth of Austria on the death of
Charles IX, followed by an encore of the lively Ton amour ma maistresse. Tom
Zajac added mightily to this performance of Jardin des Melodies as he did to
the CD of same. Various drums, pipe & tabor, pipe & triangle, 4 sizes of
tambourine. A special delight: Julie Andrijeski stepped away from her viola
long enough during the first half to make a surprise entrance with Ken Pierce
to dance two Phalese galliards round about the instrumentalists. This helped
ease the whole problem of King’s Noyse concerts: they should be given in a
resonant smaller hall where everyone can get up & dance even if they don’t
know the right steps.

I agree with all of that. The King’s Noyse is a good dance band with very fine musicians who aren’t normally playing as soloists, but producing a group sound. When dance bands like that started playing in concert settings, the next thing that happened was the Variety Show, which added singers and dancers and comedians to just the dance music, which was fine if you could dance to it, but got boring to just listen to.

The King’s Noyse tried all those variety show things:

* Ellen Hargis singing was the most successful in the most sustained way. Her ornamentation of a simple anonymous tune ??Laissez la verte couleur?? was the best illustration of how to use the _easy_ ornaments in Ortiz that I can remember hearing. (And I get illustrations like that at my recorder lessons with John Tyson regularly). I thought the balance was better when she was singing with the lutes and guitars than with the whole band, which could have been the tiredness Anne refers to. But on the more dramatic lament at the end, she was certainly having no trouble holding her own.
* The galliard with the dancers was clearly the best crowd-pleaser of the evening. I was especially impressed with Tom Zajac’s jazzy percussion introduction of the Galliard rhythm. Ken Pierce’s athletic improvisations were also quite impressive. If you ever decide you want to know more about early dance, he’s who teaches it in Boston, and I”ve really enjoyed his ability to get non-dancers improvising right off the bat. I assume the reason they didn’t use that for the encore was that Ken took his bow and left the building, although they probably also wanted to use Ellen in the encore.
* There was even a bit of a comic turn with one of the lute players pretending to be confused about where he should sit when he wasn’t being center stage. Peter Schickele has nothing to worry about, but it was nice that they weren’t taking themselves too seriously.
* Paul Odette’s guitar solo on the tiny little Renaissance guitar rang throughout Jordan Hall with exemplary clarity.

I thought the best thing about the concert was how well the program was constructed, mixing the dance music with songs and madrigals, and going from exciting to gay to sorrowful without making the audience feel disconcerted by violent shifts in mood.

Their decision about mixing singers and instruments was to have Ellen sing only the solo songs, and to have the strings play the madrigals, like ??Aupres de vous?? and ??Susanne un jour??. One unfortunate consequence of this decision is that the program notes included words and translations for the songs Ellen sang (with excellent diction), but not for the vocal music that the violins played. The violin playing on these vocal numbers was much more nuanced and voice-like than on the dance music. I particularly liked the duet between David Douglass and Robert Mealy on the two part setting of ??Aupres de Vous??

h3. You too can play this music

Another thing I liked about this concert was that it included a number of pieces that can be and often are played by amateur groups. Several of them are available for free download from this site:

* The pieces the program lists as “Pierre Attaingnant” are listed on this site as “Claude Gervaise”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#59. I believe the “Bransles de Champagne”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/318.html suite they played is the same one I have. They didn’t play the “Basse Dance”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/413.html version of ??Aupres de vous??, but if you’re playing the Sermisy, you might want to look at it.
* ??Aupres de vous?? by “Claudin de Sermisy”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#42 is available in the “two”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/193.html and “four”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/412.html part settings that they played at the concert, and also in a fairly odd “three part setting”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/192.html for more or less equal voices.
* The “Lassus”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#25 setting of “Suzanne un jour”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/294.html

h2. The Audience

At the “equivalent concert”:http://laymusic.org/wordpress/?p=25 at the last festival, I was struck by how much of the audience had just arrived in town for their big vacation of the year, and was really excited and up for a good concert. This year, it seemed to a casual observer that the audience was more the local early music afficionados, up for the event, but not really in a vacation mood.

The people in front of me were discussing how much they were looking forward to ??Psyché??, on the grounds that they thought ??Thesé?? had been the high point of previous BEMF opera productions. I agree with that.

A voice behind me exclaimed, “That’s a Bach Chorale!” when they started the Sermisy ??Il me souffit??.

h2. Disclaimers

Anne Kazlauskas studied voice with Ellen Hargis for several years.

Tom Zajac was one of my favorite coaches when I used to go to the Amherst Early Music Festival, and since he’s moved to Boston and I’ve been involved in running the BRS, I’ve been hiring him for as much coaching there as his busy schedule allows him to do. If you want to see why, he’ll be coaching the “July 25 meeting”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org.