Category: BEMF15

A post about the concert on Wednesday, June 10th at 2:00 PM,
Paulist Center Library,
by Judith Conrad. Music by Samuel Scheidt (1587 – 1654), played
on a clavichord by Andreas Hermert, after Georg Woytzig 1688, with
split sharps, triple-fretted, quarter comma meantone tuning.

It occurred to me on my way to this concert that although I
often seem like a relative expert on the clavichord even in rooms
full of very knowledgeable early music people, I’m not sure I’ve
ever heard anyone but my sister play a clavichord concert.

This is partly because very few people give clavichord concerts. Even
in its heyday, it wasn’t really a concert instrument. A lot of
organists and other keyboard players had them in their home, so
they could practice without waking the baby or disturbing their
neighbors, or needing to freeze in the cold church and organize a
bellows pumper for the organ. And they did use it for their
domestic music making. But there really weren’t concerts in our
sense, and the closest things to them used louder keyboard instruments.

But it does have other advantages over some of the louder
instruments. When you’re playing complex arrangements, you can
bring out the tune by playing it louder. Judith has been doing
this for several decades, and she gets better and better at it.

Most of the music on this concert is from a book published in
1624 called Tablatura Nova. Scheidt had studied with
Sweelinck, and would probably have been a teacher that people
flocked to from all over Northern Europe, except that the Thirty
Year’s War broke out in 1618, and made travel dangerous. So he
did a certain amount of teaching composition by correspondence,
and published this book with examples of everything a
keyboard player of the time would be expected to do.

This concert included:

• a chant setting
• a folk song setting
• a
  piece of complicted polyphony on a phrase from a Palestrina
  madrigal
• a Magnificat on Tone 9
• a setting of a Lutheran chorale
• a set of variations on a folk song
• a fugue

All this was introduced informally, and followed by
refreshments and an invitation to the audience to play the
clavichord.

Judith does this kind of concert every Boston Early Music
Festival, and occasionally in between, most often in Fall River,
Massachusetts, where she lives and is the organist/choir
director of the First Congregational Church. So if you missed
this one, you can probably have another chance. I recommend you
take it.

This year, the exhibition is in a different hotel, around the
corner from where it’s been the last few festivals.
Unfortunately, it’s still on two floors, so you have to take
elevators. But they work better than in the former venue and don’t have muzak.

Not everybody brought everything on their website, so there’s no alto
cornetto to try, and Andrea Breukink only brought the Eagle, and
not her Renaissance recorders.

But for most of us, hardware isn’t really the point — it’s all
about the people you can talk to. So here’s a brief summary of
what I accomplished in the first three days:

• Bought a book of recorder exercises I’ve been playing from
  xeroxes.
• Cleaned out all the 16th century madrigals from the AR
  Editions scratch-and-dent box, for $10 each large and heavy
  volume.
• Bought an attractive, lightweight, folding wood music stand
  at the Early Music Shop.
• Bought an alto cornet mouthpiece that might help the tenor
  serpent fulfill its mission of playing the parts that are too
  low for cornetto and too high for serpent.
• Discussed the state of early brass education with a couple
  of people who organize summer workshops.
• Got an offer to have a table for Serpent Publicaations at
  the Amherst Early Music Festival instrument fair.
• And of course saw and talked to lots of people I haven’t
  seen for some time and would like to know what they’re doing.

What you accomplish will be different, but if you’re at all
interested in anything people do at BEMF, you will find ways to
see it and talk about it if you go to the exhibition.

So if you’re reading this before the exhibition closes at 5pm
on Saturday, June 13, get over there.

• The Boston Musical Intelligencer reviewed the Sequencia
  Concert,
• And the performance of J. S. Bach
  with Huggett and Weimann,
• And a concert of Bach
  for two harpsichords,
• And the Monteverdi
  Vespers.
• And finally, the
  New
  York Times gives the festival some coverage.

Since I can’t possibly get to everything, or notice everything
about what I do get to, here are some
pointers to coverage elsewhere on the net:

• The Boston Globe has a paywall these days, but if you aren’t
  out of your 5 free articles for the month, here’s their review
  of Ulisse
• The Boston Musical Intelligencer has really broad coverage
  of the festival. Here are their reviews of Concerto
  Soave, Philippe
  Pierlot, Tapestry
  and Viriditas singing Hildegard, and Poppea.
• Fuse, founded by refugees from the Boston Globe freelance
  writers’ dispute of a few years ago, reviews Poppea

Four or six years ago, Jordi Savall played a concert of Celtic
dance music that left me muttering about how many people I know
personally who can play better dance music than that.

Two years ago, he played a concert of Turkish music that I
didn’t go to, because I figured I’d appreciate non-danceable
Turkish dance music even less than the Irish dance music I know
something about. People told me I was wrong and that it was a
wonderful concert. One of the pillars of the recorder community
was still raving last week about the Ney player on that concert.

So apparently, what he’s decided is that if he wants to play
music he wasn’t brought up to, he should get people who were to
play it with him. Last Monday, he played Spanish and Latin
American music with the Tembembe Ensemble Continuo, a Mexican
group that connects Baroque performance practice with contemporary
Latin music.

One thing I particularly liked about the concert was that,
while there was lots of virtuoso ornamentation and improvisation,
they always played the tune straight, first. This was true even
with the simple bass lines of the Ortiz ricercars. The concert
opened with Savall playing the “La Spagna” bass line:

It was gorgeous. Another example was in the “Differencias sobre
las Follias, where the castanets were accompanying all the
trickiest rhythms throughout. They gave the castanet player a
solo chorus, and you still heard the tune under the clicks.

Savall is still working on Celtic dance music. Someone who was
sitting closer than I was who can hear better should correct me if
I got this wrong, but I think he said that he had
switched the fourth and fifth strings on his bass viol (made in
1553) so that it would be easier to play bagpipe music. He then
demonstrated by playing a set of traditional Scottish dance music,
and sure enough, I’ve never heard a viol sound so much like a
bagpipe.

But the Maraca solo in Jácaras – La Petanara really did
bring down the house. At the end, Enrique Barona is holding one
maraca in his hand and it’s spinning, and it spins slowly down,
decelerating and bringing the piece to a close.

The standing ovation and two encores at the end of the concert
were well-deserved. There is more detail about who played what
when in the review
at The Boston Musical Intelligencer.

Tom Zajac has been performing and teaching recorder, reeds,
brass, and percussion for at least 3 decades to my knowledge.
Very few people in this area with any interest in any of those instruments
haven’t been supported and taught and entertained by him.

Unfortunately, he’s been having a recurring medical problem,
with several brain surgeries in the past couple of
years. Insurance covers most of the medical bills, but of course
doesn’t provide income for someone who can’t work.

It isn’t really fair to criticize this performance as if it had
been a concert. It was a massive outpouring of support for a
well-loved figure in the community on the part of both the
musicians and the public of the early music community, and on that
level it was completely successful. I understand the concert and
the online appeal together raised over $50,000.

On the other hand, it was billed as a Boston Early Music
Festival Fringe concert, which sets up certain expectations. The
rules are that fringe events can’t conflict with official Festival
events, and that they should end by 10 minutes to the hour, to
give people time to get to the next event. This event started
at 6, and I have no idea when it finished, but I left at
7:35 to get to the Jordi Savall concert and there were still 5
groups to play.

There’s a review
by someone who was able to stay for the whole thing. From the
first two thirds that I heard, I agree with this reviewer in
singling out the Wayne Hanking ocarina solo and the John Tyson
ornamentation of da Rore’s Signor mio caro.

I was less impressed than he was by all the interminable
medieval multi-verse ballads in languages the audience didn’t
know with no attempt to put the story across.

As I said, it’s not fair to call this a concert, because of
course the organizers didn’t want to tell anyone who wanted to
help that they couldn’t play, or that there was already too much
of that repertoire on the concert. I do think it’s fair to
criticize performers who just started singing in a language the
audience didn’t know without saying anything at all about what
they were singing about.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer reviews the Sunday opera performance.

Fuse has published a review of the first BEMF opera performance.

This is the start of the fifth biennial “Blogging from BEMF”
event.

As in previous years, the actual blogging during the week will
be erratic. Blogging isn’t really compatible with going to
concerts at all hours of the day and night, and I really couldn’t
report on what’s happening if I didn’t do that.

Also, I have several comp tickets in return for writing up
events for the American
Recorder Magazine. So I won’t post in great detail about
those events at least until after the magazine has appeared.

But as usual, I will try to point to any interesting coverage,
and follow the exhibition and some of the fringe events better
than the mainstream press does.

Festival Concerts

In addition to their usual paucity of reed and brass playing,
this year there’s very little renaissance music at all in the main
concerts. So I have:

• Jordi
  Savall doing music from Mexico and South America, in addition to Spanish
  Renaissance composers Diego Ortiz and Pedro Guerrero. (Monday
  evening concert.)
• Monteverdi’s
  Vespers of 1610, which my college music history courses
  considered as the beginning of the Baroque, but a lot of the
  solo playing is still very like what they did in the
  renaissance. (Thursday evening concert.)
• Norbert
  Rodenkirchen playing medieval flutes. (Thursday 11pm concert.)
• Musica
  Pacifica on the grounds that I often like hearing
  what professional concert musicians do with dance music. (Or
  if not, I like figuring out why not and criticizing it.) (Friday
  11pm concert.)
• Orfeo.
  This is the one of the three operas that has the wind band, so
  it’s the one I got. (Saturday evening opera)
• Inventions of
  Delight: Dance music from the courts of the early 17th
  century. See above; also this concert will include the wind
  ensemble that’s playing the Vespers and Orfeo. Also, the
  Saturday 11pm concert is very consistently enjoyable and high
  4 energy. These are the people who’ve been playing together all
  week in the opera orchestra, and it’s almost over, and they get
  to do what they have fun with. (Saturday 11pm concert.)
• Michael
  Form and Friends. The last few years, they’ve gotten a good
  recorder soloist or group to do the Sunday afternoon concert,
  and to teach a masterclass on Saturday. So this is where to go
  to hobnob with all the other recorder players.

Masterclasses

You should check out the Masterclass
for any instrument you’re particularly interested in. Even if the
eminent performer who teaches it doesn’t turn out to have anything
interesting to say (rare in my experience), you’ll get to see some
of the up-and-coming young players and what they’re working
on.

I’ll be going to the Saturday 11am recorder masterclass with
Michael Form. If schedule permits, I’d like to get to the lute
song one on Saturday at 4:30 with Ellen Hargis, Paul Odette and Stephen Stubbs. They
do it every festival, and I’ve always enjoyed it when I’ve been
able to go.

Exhibition

Long-time readers of this blog will of course not be under the
common misapprehension that BEMF is about holding concerts by major
recording artists and selling their CD’s.

Like other long-time institutions of the early music
movement, BEMF is built on the collaboration between professional
performers, instrument makers, musicologists, and the amateur
performers who are the most enthusiastic supporters of (and providers
of income stream to) the other pillars of the movement.

And the best place at BEMF to appreciate this is to go to the
exhibition.

This year’s List of
Exhibitors looks unusually interesting, with Adriana Breukink, an
innovative recorder maker, Leslie Ross, who makes
bassoons and dulcians, and Turners’ Quay who do
clarinets and cornetti.

Fringe Concerts

Here are some of the fringe concerts I want to call attention
to. Please note that failing to mention someone here doesn’t
mean I don’t think it will be a good concert. I’m mainly
mentioning the ones I mention either because they’re doing
Renaissance music or because I know them personally.

• Friends of Tom Zajac, 6pm, Monday, First Lutheran Church.
  Tom is a very well liked player and coach of recorders, sackbut,
  bagpipes, percussion, and probably other things. He has been
  having recurring medical problems. Insurance takes care of the
  medical bills, but not the lost income when he can’t work. So a
  bunch of his friends, also very fine players, have organized a
  benefit concert.
• Renaissonics, Noon, Tuesday, Brown Hall, New England
  Conservatory. Some of the cornerstones of Renaissance music
  were improvisation and dance music, and Renaissonics does this
  better than most currently active groups.
• Long and Away, noon, Wednesday, Hunnewell Chapel at
  Arlington Street Church. Songs from the Spanish Netherlands
  written between 1568 and 1648.
• The Duke Vespers Ensemble et al., 1:30pm, Wednesday, Church
  of the Covenant. Seventeenth century Roman
  Church music on a variety of instruments including brass.
• Judith Conrad on triple-fretted clavichord, 2pm, Wednesday,
  Paulist Center Library. Music of Samuel Scheidt published in
  1628.
• Jean Maillard Singers, 3pm, Thursday, Beacon Hill Friends
  House. Music of Jean Maillard (c. 1515 – after 1570).
• Recorder Relay, 9:15am Friday, Church of Saint John the
  Evangelist. I’m particularly looking forward to the last group,
  scheduled for 11:20,
  which is several of the local professional recorder players
  playing Renaissance music on matched Renaissance recorders.
• Convivium Musicum, Saturday, noon, First Lutheran Church.
  Their Sweelinck concert drew rave reviews when they sang it last
  Spring.
• Vox Lucens, 4:30pm, Saturday, Goethe Institute.