Category: BEMF13

Rosa das Rosas: Cantigas de Santa Maria

The Newberry Consort

Jordan Hall

Thursday, June 13, 5 PM

MULTIMEDIA

This was billed as a multi-media event, which is a really good idea
for this music, because there are lots of people who have studied the
original 13th century manuscript in literature class or art class or
music class without any information about the rest of it.

There was a screen behind the performers which had a picture from the
manuscript, and translations of what the singers were singing. This
is really nicer for both audience and performers than everyone
squinting into their program books.

Many of the pictures have people playing instruments, and it was a
little jarring when the instrumentation chosen by the performers was
completely different from that in the pictures. I was particularly
struck during Cantiga 300, where the picture showed two
very conical bore wind instruments (not in enough detail to tell
whether they had a brass mouthpiece, a reed, or a fipple) and Tom
Zajac was playing a cylindrical bore traverse flute.

RECORDER and OTHER INSTRUMENTS

The music of the Cantigas is vocal, but to listen to an hour and
fifteen minutes without intermission, it was really nice that there
was a variety of instruments. There was vielle, rebec, lute, harp,
citole, hammered dulcimer, flute, recorder, bagpipe, and percussion.
(Played by 5 different people.)

Variety was also provided by supplementing the two singers (Ellen
Hargis and Matthew Dean) from the Newberry Consort with 5 singers from
the Boston area _a capella_ group Exultemus. So while Ellen Hargis
did the vast majority of the solo singing, dialogs could happen with
another singer, and some of the more general emotions could be
expressed with a choral sound. The final piece, Cantiga 10: Rosa das
Rosas, used this sound particularly well.

The recorder was actually on only one piece, but it was one of the
more striking uses of instrumental accompaniment. Cantiga 103 tells
the story of a monk who asks the Virgin to show him what the bliss of
heaven is like, and he starts listening to a bird sing, and the next
thing he knows it’s 300 years later and he no longer knows anyone in
the monastery. A highly improvised recorder solo (by Tom Zajac) was
the depiction of the bird song.

The other instrumentation I found most memorable was the quite simple
castanet beat (also played by Tom Zajac) with the Cantiga 425, about
the joy the disciples felt at the Resurection.

13th or 21st CENTURY?

The medieval notation used in the Cantigas is quite good at telling us
what notes comprise the tune, but experts differ by quite a bit about
the rhythms, and there aren’t harmonies or instrumentations notated
at all. So one is tempted to conclude that the good performers of
this music are actually quite good composers, and the music they’re
playing is twenty first century music, based on some material from the
thirteenth century.

This concert, partly because of the immersion in the pictures and the
ease of following the words, and also because of the relatively
“straight” interpretations, without a lot of composed harmony and
counterpoint, seemed more like a real experience from the 13th century
than other medieval concerts I have heard.

Continuing to bring you my reporting from the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival. The
American Recorder editor cut this one
even worse than most of what I sent her, because it wasn’t really
a recorder concert at all.

The New York Continuo Collective

L’amour et La Folie

Love and Madness in the Air de Cour

Thursday, June 13, 2013, Noon

Gordon Chapel, Old South Church

645 Boylston ST., Boston

The New York Continuo Collective is mostly a bunch of plucked string
players accompanying singers. There’s one bass viol (Virginia
Kaycoff), and they get instrumental solos (aside from lutes playing the
tunes) by having a couple of people play recorders (Grant Herreid and Paul
Shipper).

Every “semester” they study a different repertory of 17th century
song, and this Spring it was the French Air de Cour. The program was
based around a collection of songs with lute tablature published in
1614 by Gabriel Bataille, which seem to be from a ballet depicting a
quarrel between Amour and La Folie.

The program was semi-staged and variously costumed — some characters
only wearing a hat to indicate their character, but Venus (Kirsten
Kane) wearing a golden gown that was definitely not street wear. La
Folie (Brittany Fowler) wore street wear, but mixed patterns and
stripes in a charmingly disturbing way.

The plot involved Amour attempting to prove that he enhances human
happiness, in the face of La Folie’s claim that love only leads to
misery. So there are lots of songs sung by characters labeled
“quarreling lovers”, “rude lover”, or “angry lover”. So with the
dance interludes and the various moods of the lovers, it was a very
diverse program. The ornamentation, both improvised and written out
by the director (Grant Herried) also added variety.

One of the problems of running an early music group in contemporary
American musical culture is that the guitar and lute players often
become very skilled on their instruments without getting the ensemble
experience that wind and bowed string instrument players have
routinely. The Continuo Collective is a brilliant response to this
problem, while also producing a very enjoyable show.

I promised you more about BEMF, and some of what I want to
say will take place over several posts. But I got the Fall Early
Music America, and thought I’d comment on their reviews.

The fringe concerts are numerous, diverse, and crammed into a
small number of time slots when there aren’t official events, so
it isn’t that surprising that the EMA reviewers didn’t review any
of the ones I went to. But they at least mentioned all of the
“main stage” events.

I like the idea of 11 PM concerts, but in practice,
unless they’re very lively indeed, I often find myself falling
asleep, especially later in the week, which is strenuous for me.
So although I expected them to be good concerts, I didn’t go to
the Wednesday night lute concert (EMA: soothed an audience
of insomniacs) or the Thursday night
Atalanta concert. I did as usual enjoy the Saturday
night Tragicommedia concert of German drinking
songs. But I would have been just as well off skipping the gaelic
song and harp music concert on Friday.

I agree that the Newberry Consort multimedia presentation of
the Cantigas de Santa Maria was one of the
highlights of the festival, and I’ll probably give you some more
about that later.

EMA calls Emma Kirkby’s Dowland performance “transcendant”, and
I agree with that. I was worried about going to a concert of lute
songs in a space as big as Jordan Hall, but it wasn’t a problem at
all, even though my friends and I decided to stay in the nosebleed
seats where my lingering cough wouldn’t disturb as many people.
(There’s also more leg room there — I don’t know why those seats
aren’t sold to the long-legged at a premium.)

EMA says “The Hilliard Ensemble brought an
admirable transparency and lucidity to a remarkably diverse
repertoire.” I liked the lucidity, but I would have prefered a
real program to the “greatest hits” approach they took. I liked
all the sixteenth century music better than
all the other stuff, so I’d rather they’d just played
that.

The Royal Wind Music concert did, as EMA reports,
blow the audience away, but I share the reservations of David
Schulenberg in the Boston Musical Intelligencer that they made
a verbatim copy of what was on their CD in a repertoire that was
intended to be improvised.