Category: bemf 07

I should redo the serpent publications one sometime when I’m not doing all the festival stuff.

But I’m pleased with the way the “Blogging from BEMF”:http://www.serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/blog.pdf flyer turned out. I figured Google images would give me an elegant person with a quill pen, and the first one who turned up was “Voltaire”:http://www.jasa.net.au/images/qpvoltaire1.gif.

If anyone had comments on the text, let me know.

In general I think people enjoyed it. It did seem pretty long; especially all the dancing and singing after the ??dénouement??.

Having a libretto by a good playright (Thomas Corneille, younger brother of Pierre) always helps to get a plot you can follow and characters you might care what happens to them.

The singing was good. It isn’t an opera with major arias that you go out of the theater whistling, but in general the BEMF opera directors are good at getting singers who not only sing well but sound good together.

The orchestra was good. It looked like the bulk of the recorder playing was actually done by the oboe players, with the (at least local) name brand recorder players (Tom Zajac, Héloïse Degrugillier, and Justin Godoy) playing the on-stage scenes but not sitting in the orchestra pit making the tone quality sound different when there were recorders doubling the violins. The trumpets sounded the kind of glorious you hope for in the opening fanfare (this year done inside the theater instead of in the lobby). Then they spent close to an hour sitting in the pit before their next ensemble, and it had some problems. There might have been two hours before their appearance at the end, and that had some intonation problems, too. It would be interesting to research what Lully and other baroque conductors did about this problem, but they might have just ignored it.

Some of the solo dancing was really wonderful. There was one male solo in the last act that everybody I talked to had been particularly impressed by, but we couldn’t figure out from the program who had been dancing what. The thing that looks like it happened at the right time was Gilles Poirier as L’Architecture, but I can’t say I noticed anything particularly architectural about the dance.

The dancer friend I had dinner with afterwards said she is always annoyed by the ??porte de bras?? of the BEMF dancers. According to her training, the arms should always move from the center and be much more articulated. I wish I’d had that conversation at intermission — I would have liked to see whether it changed the way I saw them. We all agreed that the solo dancing was generally more impressive than the groups. The demons in Hell were the best of the production numbers. I thought they could have made more of the flying (by Foy) — in general, they could have had their feet on the ground and looked about the same, although it did make better use of the space. People in the balcony reported that they couldn’t always see the flown bodies.

The sets were quite ingenious, using a folding metal fence to set up a foreground area. The four dancing chorus members who opened and closed it also provided commentary on the action, e.g., warning Psyché not to pull aside the curtain behind which Amour was sleeping.

I enjoyed the costumes, particularly the sparkly white dress Psyché wore after intermission.

So my recommendation is to go see it if you’re interested in baroque opera, or French culture, or 17th century theater. But I wouldn’t run around telling everyone to go see it to *become* interested in any of those things.

h3. Theater

If you go, bring a heavy sweater and warm socks. My little black dress has a nice warm jacket to it, but the dressiest shoes I’m willing to wear for the amount of walking taking the T to downtown Boston implies are sandals, which I normally wear without socks, and my feet were freezing. A friend who was sitting in the balcony was just under a vent, and probably had it even worse.

My seat was at the back of the orchestra, and I enjoyed it better than the nosebleed seats I’ve had the last couple of times. In general you can see the orchestra a bit better from the balcony, but this was high up enough that I could see who was doing what pretty well.

One friend complained that there was no champagne and only California wine for sale in the lobby.

h3. Audience

Mostly seemed to be attentive and not restless. The people on the inside seats in our 6-person row had to leave before 10:30. I don’t know how long they had thought it would be. They were apologetic, but it seemed like an odd decision to make.

There’s always an international flavor to BEMF, and even to downtown Boston without BEMF, but I thought I heard more French than usual in the lobby.

A recorder playing friend I talked to before the opera had been to three of the fringe events I recommended and didn’t go to yesterday, and reported that he enjoyed them all, although by the end of the day they were starting to blur in his mind.

I sat next to Tom Prescott, the recorder maker, at the opera. He says he has to get to the opera early in the week, because later he has to spend his evenings fixing people’s recorders.

John Tyson said his workshop and concert went well. He had 15 people at the workshop (we had printed 16 booklets, so that was a good decision). He close to filled Williams Hall at the New England Conservatory. He would have rather used Jordan Hall later in the week, but he felt good about both the concert and the turnout. He confirmed that the program was almost identical to the April 30 BRS concert series program. I asked him if they’d changed their interpretation of the “Baldwin cuckoo piece”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/406.html any. He had said after the April concert that it was a bit in flux. He replied that it seemed to have reached a plateau at the moment. Another intensive rehearsal with really taking it apart and putting it back together might help some, but the right way to work on it at this point is to play a lot more Baldwin.

The two things I’m committed to doing today are getting to the exhibition and checking it out and leaving the flyers, and going to the ??Ensemble Clément Janequin?? concert tonight.

I’ll probably bring my two Tom Prescott recorders to him at the exhibition so he can oil and clean them; I don’t think they have any tuning problems.

I went to dinner with friends after the opera last night, so I’m low enough on sleep that I’ll probably decide to take a nap rather than see a lot of fringe events this afternoon, but if I were going to go to them, the ones I’d be interested in would be “Liber Unusualis”:http://www.liberunusualis.com/, the “Fanfare Consort”:http://www.fanfareconsort.com/ (on the grounds that they include a clarino, and that I like Doug Freundlich, the lute player), and the “Alamire Consort”:http://www.unh.edu/music/alamire (on the grounds that they include a cornetto).

h3. Dog-walking, etc.

Yesterday wasn’t bad. Sunny only got a walk around the block in the evening, but we stopped at the dog park on the way to the grocery store in the afternoon, so he wasn’t too neglected.

I went to Chinatown with friends for dinner after the opera, and I have two cartons in my refrigerator, which should be a couple of after-concert meals this week. The theater district restaurants all seem to be closed after the theater these days, which suggests that Boston commercial theater is probably pretty dead these days.

One of the reasons that people who spend a lot of their lives doing this kind of music look forward to BEMF is that they get to spend a lot of time talking to the other people who do the same things about what they’ve been doing.

I rode back to Cambridge on the train with a friend who plays viols and recorders and sings shape note and west gallery music. She had just spent 2 months in Oxford, England. She got to play with the viol players there, and also to go to a couple of shape note singings and one west gallery meeting. I especially wanted to know if she’d had a chance to sing West Gallery music with Edwin Macadam’s serpent, but he had been only conducting and not playing the meeting she went to.

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.

My ticket to the opera is tonight. So I’ll aim to be at the theater in time for the 6:40 Fanfare.

Looking at the program in the book, it looks like there will be lots of recorder playing. Not only are three people listed as recorder players, but apparently the oboe players are all going to do recorder some of the time, as well.

There are also four trumpet players listed, which seems to be the sum total of the early brass on the official concerts, so enjoy it while you can. If you’re where you have a good view of them notice whether they’re moving their fingers up and down like recorder players. If they are, they’re playing instruments with holes placed so they can be opened and closed to make some of the notes better in tune when played with modern trumpet technique. This is a 20th century innovation; early brass players have agreed to differ on whether current builders should build trumpets that way, but one hopes there is consensus that original instruments which are still playable with the older technique should not have holes knocked into them.

h3. Preparations

I still have publishing work to get done to put flyers at the exhibition tomorrow. I have printed “Boston Recorder Society”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org summer meeting flyers, and “Cantabile Renaissance Band”:http://www.laymusic.org/windband.html flyers, but I still have to update the “Serpent Publications”:http://www.laymusic.org/serpent-publications.html flyer. I was originally thinking of putting a “Blogging at the BEMF” tagline on the Serpent Publications flyer, but maybe it’s worth making a separate flyer for it.

Last year, I was involved in getting the Boston Recorder Society to have t-shirts made and sold at the “American Recorder Society”:http://www.americanrecorder.org/ booth. It was quite gratifying to see one late in the week on the back of someone I didn’t know. So this year my aim is to overhear a conversation of someone arguing with something that appears in this blog.

h3. “Fringe events”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/06fest/fringe.htm#FrTues

Again, I probably won’t get to many of these because of having to finish my preparations, but here’s what I would love to get to if I had time:

* The “Renaissonics”:http://www.renaissonics.com/ concert and workshop. The listing only tells you that the concert is at 2 PM. If you had wanted to also go to the workshop, you should have been there at 10 AM. I think the concert will include a lot of what we heard at the April 30 Boston Recorder Society concert series concert, but will also have a dancer, which adds a lot.
* “Sudie Marcuse”:http://www.sudiemarcuse.com/ sang ??O rosa bella?? in one of my classes the very first time I went to the “Amherst Early Music Festival”:http://www.amherstearlymusic.org/, and it was one of the best experiences of the week. So I’d like to hear what she’s doing now.
* Travessada I haven’t heard, but they’re all good musicians, and Renaissance Flute Consort music was what Eric Haas was excited about teaching at the Boston Recorder Society this year. So it would be fun to hear what he’s doing with it professionally.
* “Seven Times Salt”:http://www.seventimessalt.com/ produces a reliably lively concert. They’ve played the Boston Recorder Society concert series twice.
* “The Alamire Consort”:http://www.unh.edu/music/alamire promises to include some cornetto. I think I”ll have another chance to hear them later in the week. It’s really too bad there’s so little brass in this area, and that BEMF isn’t working harder to bring in more of the good brass playing from other parts of the world.

h3. Dog Walking (and practicing and other normal activities of daily life)

Yesterday was pretty good. Sunny got a normal dog park walk a little earlier than he usually does. I didn’t get a normal practice session in, but I played both cornetto and recorder a bit before leaving for the concert. Supper was after getting home from the concert and after taking the dog for his bedtime walk, so it was pretty late, but otherwise normal.

Today, the dog will have the normal number of walks, but the evening one will be both short and early. Depending on what I do after the opera, the bedtime one may be late. I should manage to get some practicing in.

At some point, I’ll be spending time printing the handouts for the performance practice workshop that I spend last week typesetting.

I have a ticket to the “King’s Noyse”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/06fest/concerts/noyse.htm festival concert tonight. I’ll have to leave early enough to stand in line to pick up my program book, and to figure out how to get a one-week pass out of the T machine.

The “Fringe Concert Schedule”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/06fest/fringe.htm#FrMon is thin today compared to what it will be later in the week, but if I had time (unlikely with the printing), I would like to see both “Liber Unusualis”:http://www.liberunusualis.com/ and Concertino.

I haven’t heard Liber Unusualis recently, but friends who have say their sound and their commitment to the music is inspiring.

I haven’t heard Concertino either, but I’ve heard both Elaine Funaro and Owen Watkins, and I’d like to hear them together. Too many of the local fine recorder players don’t bother getting equally fine keyboard players to play with.

h3. Dog walking

“Sunny’s”:http://www.laymusic.org/sunny.html friends are presumably concerned about how all this gadding about to concerts and other events that I’m doing is going to affect Sunnys walk schedule. Today it shouldn’t be a problem, as I’ll be home at all the normal times. The 6:00 trip to the dog park may have to be a bit shorter than sometimes.

Today is the official start of the Festival, but of course anyone heavily involved has been working hard for weeks or months to get ready.

My own preparations involved getting the “Boston Recorder Society”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org” summer meeting flyer printed and into the hands of someone who can put it out on the exhibit floor before I’ll get there on Wednesday.

I’ve also been typesetting the handout for John Tyson’s “Renaissance Performance Practice Workshop”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/06fest/fringe.htm#FrTues, which led to “additions”http://laymusic.org/wordpress/?p=335 to the music on this site.

“Exhibitors”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/06fest/ex.htm have been sending out their literature; I got “Tom Prescott’s”:http://www.prescottworkshop.com/ brochure in the mail a couple of weeks ago.

I caught the tail end of the WHRB preview program, which included a very nice recording of the “Harmonious Blacksmith”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org/calendar/cal_popup.php?op=view&id=522 group, which is doing a “fringe concert”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/06fest/fringe.htm on Thursday at 11 AM.

“Judith Conrad”:http://home.mindspring.com/~judithconrad/ (disclaimer: She’s my sister, so my opinion that she gives the best clavichord concerts I’ve ever heard is biased, but not necessarily wrong) sends the program for her “two programs”:http://www.serpentpublications.org/laymusic/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/judy-bemf07.txt. She’s also making t-shirts; I’ve seen the design and I’m really looking forward to having one.