Category: concerts

Judith, by Ensemble Dialogos

The Boston Early Music
Festival (BEMF) concert last night was a setting of a Croatian
epic poem for solo voice, bowed strings, and flutes. In addition
to credits for the three musicians, there were credits for stage
direction, philological advice, lighting, title translation… The
program notes and texts can be downloaded from the concert
page, if you want to know more than this page tells you.

The performance lasted slightly more than an hour, and was
followed by a session for audience questions.

What I personally most enjoyed was the improvised 3-voice
polyphony. It’s in a very dissonant style. The group leader (the
singer) said that she’d seen a book holding up a table in a
Franciscan monastery, and had asked to look at it and it turned
out to be directions for improvising this kind of polyphony. They
were very specific, along the lines of, “If the tune goes up by a
step, here are the choices for what the other voices can do.”
There was a part right after the death of Holefernes where the
singer and the flute cadence on a major second interval and just
hold it. (I really mean on the major second; it doesn’t
resolve to a fifth or anything.) It sent shivers up my spine.

The poetry, music, and acting were all superb, and if you get a
chance to see this group, you should take it. They’re working on
finding production and distributors for a DVD of the
production.

One minor nit about the production. I was sitting off to the
side and had trouble reading the titles when the lighting got
brighter after Judith returns to Jerusalem with the head of
Holofernes. I asked a friend who had been sitting directly in the
center of the front row if she’d had problems, and she said she
had no trouble reading them except when they were obscured by the
performers, which was frequent. Since these seats we had are
normally considered among the best in their price range (mine the
cheap range, my friend’s the expensive ones), and none
of the price ranges were anything like sold out, I would guess
that a fair percentage of the audience was having one or the other
of these problems.

This was the first event of this year’s BEMF that I’d gotten
to, and I was disappointed to see that Jordan Hall was only a
quarter to a third full. I understand that the opera has
essentially sold out, but that all the concerts have lots of
available seats, so if you were thinking you might want to go, you
should encourage yourself to do it.

Report on the May 26 meeting

We played:

Sermisy
Amy souffrez (2 voice)
Aupres de vous (2 voice)
Anonymous
Duet 113
Bicinia (ed. Phalese)
Fantasia 25
Fantasia 1
Fantasia 2
Sermisy
Amy souffrez (3 voice, with ornaments from the Attaignant
keyboard tablature)
Aupres de vous (3 voice)
Changeons propos
Vignons, vignons
Heurteur
Quand je bois
Purcell
He that drinks is immortal
Down with Bacchus

Schedule

We will not be meeting either next week or the week after,
because of the West
Gallery Quire rehearsal and the
Boston Early Music Festival.

After that, it will be Summer time, and the livin’ is
easy for lots of us, so we should get lots of people coming
and be able to do polychoral Gabrielli and other things with lots
of parts.

So here’s the schedule:

Tuesday, June 2
No meeting
Tuesday, June 9
No meeting
Tuesday, June 16, and subsequent Tuesdays
Meetings resume at 7:45 PM at my
place.
Sunday, June 21

Party at 4 PM at my place.

Party

From time to time, the Cantabile Band has parties, so that we
can invite all our friends to have as much fun as we do. The big
difference between the parties and the meetings is that we eat and
drink before as well as after singing and playing. Also because
we have friends we like to sing and play with who have trouble
making it on Tuesdays. And in this case, because the Walk for
Hunger wasn’t really the best environment for some of the music we
played there. I was very impressed that we didn’t get lost when
the helicopter went over, but the audience probably wasn’t able
to hear how impressive it was. So we might get together and burst into song from that program from time to time.

Since the party will be held shortly after BEMF, I’ll be
printing the invitation on the back of the flyers, so that people
can check us out by coming either to a meeting or to a party.

If you want to print either flyers or invitations, you can
download them. The invitation
includes the flyer as a second
page, so if you don’t have a double-sided printer, you may want to
print them separately.

Assuming the weather is at all friendly to such things, we’ll
be doing the eating and drinking in the backyard, and will have
the grill going, so you’re welcome to bring food contributions
that need grilling.

Cantabile at BEMF

At BEMF, I will be attempting to keep the flyer table at the
exhibition stocked with our flyers, in the version with the
invitation on the back. If you’re going to be hanging around the
exhibition, it would be good if you could help with that, at least
to the extent of letting me know if we seem to have run out.

If you’re going to fringe events of interest to the same
population we recruit from, it would be good if you could take
some flyers, either to leave on a table or to hand to likely
suspects.

BEMF events of interest

I have tickets to several of the BEMF concerts: all the 11PM
ones, all the recorder ones, and the Renaissance music ones. So
that’s Tuesday evening, Wednesday through Saturday at 11PM, Friday
evening, and Sunday afternoon.

There are fringe events where our friends will be playing or
singing:

Monday, June 8
12:30pm Seven Hills Renaissance Wind Ensemble (Elizabeth
Hardy, Cathy Stein & Matthew Stein, shawms & dulcians; Rigel
Lustwerk, cornetto; Daniel Meyers, sackbut; Daniel Stillman,
shawm, dulcian & sackbut). Musicians of the Golden Fleece: Wind
Band Music from the Hapsburg Courts of the 16th Century. Program
featuring sacred and secular works by Thomas Stolzer and Orlande
de Lassus, Kappellmeisters to Louis II of Hungary and Albrecht V
of Bavaria. First Church in Boston. $15 donation. 617-388-2363
or 7hillsband@gmail.com.

Tuesday, June 9
12:30pm Harmonious Blacksmith (Ah Young Hong, soprano;
Justin Godoy, recorder; William Simms, lute, theorbo, guitar;
Nika Zlataric, viola da gamba; Joseph Gascho,
harpsichord). Phantasticke Spirites. Inspired by the bawdy and
joyous spirit of English songs, Harmonious Blacksmith improvises
and ornaments the music of Byrd, Morley, and their
contemporaries. Named after Thomas Weelkes’s fourth book of
madrigals, this program also draws from the keyboard music in
the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. First Church in Boston. $20/$10
st, sr, BEMF, EMA, ARS. 781-507-4160 or
info@HarmoniousBlacksmith.com.
4pm Seven Times Salt (Karen Burciaga, violin; Daniel Myers,
recorders; Josh Schreiber Shalem, bass viol; Matthew Wright,
lute; with guests Tracy Cowart, mezzo-soprano; Michael Barrett,
tenor; Kyle Parrish, narrator). A Brave Barrel of Oysters: Music
of Samuel Pepys’ London. Sample the delights of Restoration
England, as described in Samuel Pepys’ diaries. Music of Lawes,
Locke, Matteis, and Pepys himself! Beacon Hill Friends
House. $10 suggested donation. 508-878-7028 or
Karen@seventimessalt.com.
Wednesday, June 10
3:30pm Judith Conrad, clavichord. The Labyrinthine Keyboard
Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621). Sweelinck’s
Fantasias are among the monuments of early Baroque music. They
require a different sort of listening from the classical forms
of music, in much the way that the walk of a cathedral labyrinth
is so different from a standard religious service. Performing on
a triple-fretted clavichord by Andreas Hermert of Berlin,
2003. The Paulist Center Library. $20 donation to benefit the
Iraq Family Relief Fund. 508-674-6128 or
judithconrad@mindspring.com
Thursday, June 11
9am Viola da Gamba Society of America. The Gamba Gamut. A
series of five mini-programs, spanning the repertoire of the
viola da gamba, performed by emerging and established artists of
the VdGSA. 9am: Empire Viols present The State of Gambo, a
program of accompanied duo viols, with music by Young, Jenkins,
Hume, and Simpson; 9:45am: Brady Lanier, viola da gamba & Molly
Hammond, harpsichord, present a program of Marais and Forqueray;
10:15am: Brandeis University Viol Collegium, directed by Sarah
Mead, presents a program of works drawn from manuscripts from
the Gorham Collection at Brandeis (includes Lasso, Willaert,
Vecchi, and others); 11am: Brook Green presents a program of
solo music for treble viol, including works by Bassano and Hume;
11:30am: Long and Away presents Ye Sacred Muses, a program of
English consort songs and dances. Cathedral Church of
St. Paul. FREE, donations welcome. 239-994-3924 or
scf@cwru.edu.
12:30pm Boston Recorder Quartet (Roxane Layton, Judith
Linsenberg, Roy Sansom & Tom Zajac, recorders). Recorder Music
from Seven Centuries. Works for recorder quartet by Byrd, Bach,
Rore, Merula, Sansom, Shannon, and Anon. Emmanuel Church. $15
donation/ $10 donation for st, sr, BEMF, EMA. 617-489-3906 or
dellalsansom@earthlink.net.
2pm Saltarello (Sarah Cantor, recorders; Angus Lansing,
viola da gamba; Andrus Madsen, harpsichord). Handel’s Italian
Passion and English Charm. Handel’s solo sonatas, most of them
written during the first two decades of the 18th century,
exhibit him at his best. At once tuneful and inventive, fiery
and tender, Handel was so fond of these pieces that returned to
them again and again, borrowing bits and pieces for use in other
works. Come hear what made these sonatas so irresistible! The
College Club of Boston. $15/$10 st, sr, BEMF, EMA,
ARS. 617-669-4292 or sarah@cantornote.com.
Friday, June 12
3:30pm Judith Conrad, clavichord. Tangled Mysteries:
Clavichord Music of Renaissance Poland. Music from 16th-century
tablature books from Lublin, Warsaw, and Gdansk, performed on
early clavichords, after original instruments from Silesia
(ca. 1470 & ca. 1600). The Paulist Center Library. $20 donation
to benefit the Iraq Family Relief Fund. 508-674-6128 or
judithconrad@mindspring.com.
Saturday, June 13
10:30am WIP Series (Works in Progress). Mini-recitals by
fabulous folk: featuring Judith Conrad, Sylvia Berry, Gail
Olszewski, Larry Wallach, and Mariken Palmboom. Harpsichord
Clearing House, Radisson Hotel Dartmouth Room, 6th floor. $5 or
FREE with BEMF Pass.
12:30pm Convivium Musicum, directed by Michael
Barrett. Going for Baroque. The Electors of Saxony made the
court at Dresden a haven for Protestant composers including
Hassler, Praetorius, and Schütz, shapers of the emerging Baroque
idiom. This concert will feature sacred works for voices by
these German masters. Church of St. John the Evangelist. $10/$5
st, sr, BEMF, EMA. 609-457-8573 or info@convivium.org.

If I’ve missed anything, you can leave a comment here, or email me and I’ll add you.

Other events

If you’re interested in the West Gallery Quire, come to either
the June 3 concert or the June 7 meeting.

The concert has the merit of having been rehearsed, and being a
selection of a lot of the better music. It will be at 8 PM on
June 3, at the Brighton-Allston Congregational Church, at 404
Washington St. in Brighton.

The meeting has the advantage that you too can play or sing.
It’s probably the best opportunity for several hundred or even
thousand miles for singing with a serpent.

Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF)

I ordered my tickets to BEMF this
morning. I had been agonizing over how many to buy since the
brochures arrived in February, but I finally decided to go with a
minimal number. So what I got is all the Renaissance ones, all
the recorder ones, and all the 11PM ones. And a pass and a book.

The festival is a major event in the early music community,
which takes place in odd-numbered years. (In even-numbered
years, there’s an event in Berkely, California.) There are
concerts by world-renowned players, masterclasses with famous
teachers, fringe events by less-renowned players, and an
exhibition of instruments and related paraphernalia.

Two years ago, this blog was just starting to take shape, and I
announced that I would be blogging from BEMF.
I attempted to convince other people to also post about their
experiences, since there’s no way one person can cover all the
events, or even the whole set of events that are interesting to
them. I got more comments on these posts than I usually do, but
didn’t get a lot of guest blogging action, partly because a lot
of people who might have done it were out-of-town without their
usual network access. But mostly because if you’re as busy as
the really committed early music people are at BEMF, you don’t
want to add writing to it.

So this year, I’ll keep up my one post a day policy, and during
that week (June 9-14 for me) most
posts will probably be about BEMF, but I’m not going to try to
be comprehensive, even about what I’m doing. I will set up a BEMF 2009
category, and if you’d like to get a user account that entitles
you to post entries on this blog, let me know and I’ll set it
up. You don’t need my permission to post comments, and it would
be really good if my readers wanted to

In terms of preparation for BEMF, I’ll be putting out flyers
for the Cantabile Band
and Serpent Publications.

I’m hoping to get the new serpentpublications.org
site set up by then, but it’s going slower than I hoped for, and
the flyer might still have to stick to the current laymusic.org and lulu.com stuff.

Fortepiano Concert

The HIP (Historically Informed Performance) movement has been
moving steadily into the nineteenth and even twentieth
centuries. I was aware that there was enough difference in
orchestral instruments and their style of playing for this to be
interesting for orchestral works. And of course, singing and
playing music in the size hall it was designed for can be a lot
more satisfying than in a space designed to seat two or three
orders of magnitude more people than the composers and original
performers envisioned.

However, it wasn’t until last Sunday that I really realized
that the nineteenth century piano repertoire could benefit from
HIP.

The Loring Greenough House in Jamaica Plain, built in 1760, has
a Longman and Broderip square piano built in about 1800. I heard
a concert played on this piano last sunday by Judith Conrad.

The first two thirds or so of the concert was what I expect
from fortepianists — eighteenth century music where the
composers clearly expected non-equal temperaments and the piano
was playing in ensemble with instruments like the baroque flute
that hadn’t yet been engineered to play in a modern concert
hall. I particularly enjoyed the Haydn Flute sonata, ably
played by baroque flutist Michael Shand.

The fugues of Antonin Reicha, who straddled the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, also benefited from the shorter reverb
times and more intimate tone of the earlier instrument.

But then they switched to Mendelssohn. I grew up hearing
pieces like the Mendelssohn Songs without Words
played on a Steinway, and it hadn’t really occurred to me that
they too would benefit from the more intimate sound of the
earlier instrument. It’s clearly music for the living room and
not the concert hall, but I hadn’t realized that it was for a
living room with a cute little piano that plays thirds that are
consonances and gets out of the way of singers and instruments
who are trying to make music with it instead of dominating
them.

Another HIP aspect of this performance was that the audience
was invited to sing along on vocal works that complemented the
performance. I personally find this adds a lot to my ability to concentrate on other people’s music for two hours.

Unfortunately, the first Sunday in May is a terrible time to
play a concert, because you have to share your audience with all
the other people who are trying to play concerts then. So this one
drew 9 people and was probably doing well in comparison to some
other events. I would suggest that most performers whose rehearsal
schedules aren’t tied to the academic calendar should avoid concerts in
December and May.

Additions

These are things I heard at the Boston Early Music Festival and wanted to play with the group:

If anyone has access to a copy of the four part version of Changeons propos, which was sung by the Orlando Consort, I’d be happy to transcribe it and put it up.

John Tyson was putting together his music to teach at summer workshops, and asked if I’d like to transcribe this quodlibet from the Wolfenüttel library. So here’s En m’esbatant/Gracieuse plaisant mousniére/Gente fleur de noblesse. I should admit that the reading didn’t go completely smoothly when my group played it last night, but we put it down to the heat rather than a bad transcription.

Final Echo of BEMF, the Royal Wind Music

One last event from BEMF, Saturday June 23rd. A special concert/demonstration by Paul Leenhouts and the Royal Wind Music for Boston Recorder Society at New England Conservatory. The entire double-sextet plus subcontrabass presented a varied program with introductions to the ensemble, the instruments and the individual pieces. There were demonstrations of the ranges of the recorders, and multiple ones of the lower octave of the largest recorder we will probably ever see, the 10-foot-long subcontrabass recorder in B-flat built in the shop of Adriana Breukink. All pieces were played from memory, there was no sheet music for the one-hour program.

Their recorders are built in the same style, and all tuned to A=460, one of the many standard pitches particular to an early time and place. They blend well and speak clearly and quickly, even in fast passages on the bass instruments.
Questions and answers after touched on topics of arranging, tuning to pure intonation, memorization, rehearsal language (English, for an international group of twenty-something students). Paul explained and gave a demonstration of perfectly tuning thirds, both major and minor. He prefers arranging for the lower voiced consort, since the tenor recorder is the highest pitched one to match a human voice. A good time was had by all.

Blogging after BEMF

As you can see, I’m still catching up on all the things I’d like to write about, and I know a lot of people who were interested in this project had even less time and internet access than I did.

So if you heard things you’d like to blog about, my offer to do it here still stands:

* Comment on the articles.
* If you want to write your own articles, let me know and I’ll give you an author account.
* If you want to write but not deal with blog software. email me and I’ll post it, attributing it to you.

If you want to blog but not to be a guest on someone else’s blog, there are lots of places where you can set up your own blog without charge, and quite easily. The one I know and recommend is “wordpress.com”:http://www.wordpress.com. I don’t use it because I can’t put “Google Adsense”:http://www.google.com/adsense ads on it, but if you’re not interested in monetizing the blog, it seems to be at a pretty good spot on the flexibility/ease of use continuum. If you do that and have content relevant to BEMF 07, let me know and I’ll put a link to it here.

The Royal Wind Music: The Gods’ Flute Heaven

This was a group of a dozen young professional recorder players who played about two dozen renaissance recorders under the baton of Paul Leenhouts. I thought it was by far the most riveting all-recorder concert I’ve ever heard. Here are some high points:

* The improvisation on Boffons, where Andreas Böhlen walked out into the audience.
* The award for the single most startling chord on the concert, and maybe in the entire festival, goes to the one on the penultimate cadence of the Bach Choral ??Leit uns mit deiner rechten Hand??. I had been thinking that group (seetings of ??Vater unser in himmelreich??) was being very square and German compared to the dance music that had preceded it, and suddenly, it was unsquare and German. Of course the startling quality was possible only because of the impeccable tuning.
* The low quartet playing ??Triste España sin ventura??. Most of the concert had most players playing most of the time, using sizes from soprano or alto to the 10-foot subcontrabass. But this set alternated a low consort (with the top line on C-bass) with a high consort).

I found it inspiring, and I hope the people I play with did too, that the entire concert was performed without written music (except for the conductor). Tom Zajac remarked that that made his 10 minutes of onstage memorized music in the opera seem like child’s play. I’m told a group member said that the hardest part of this was remembering the order of pieces and which of the two dozen recorders you need to pick up.

h3. You too can play this music

We play this stuff all the time, but most of it has fairly good modern editions. The ones on this site are the “Dowland”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#4 group:
* “Lachrimae Antiquae”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/69.html
* “The Earle of Essex Galiard”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/86.html

Both of these will be in ??Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares figured in seaven passionate pavanes??, to be published soon at the “laymusic lulu.com store”:http://stores.lulu.com/laymusic

h3. And you can see more of the recorders

The “Boston Recorder Society”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org will be hosting a special event for their friends and members on Saturday, June 23 from 2-3:30 PM in the Carr Organ Room of the “New England Conservatory”:http://www.newenglandconservatory.edu.

Globe coverage of Friday’s concerts

I didn’t go to either of these concerts, but here’s the “Boston Globe review”:http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2007/06/18/mozart_sonatas_sparkle_at_early_music_fest/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+A%26E+%2F+Music+-+CD+and+music+reviews%2C+news+and+clips
of the Mozart recital by Kristian Bezuidenhout and Petra Müllejans, and the Sequentia concert.

I did hear people in line for the 11 PM concert that night complaining about the absence of Benjamin Bagby; I agree that the Festival management should have announced it.

Please leave a comment if you want to discuss these concerts.

TRAGICOMEDIA and Friends: Welcome to All the Pleasures

Here’s the “Boston Globe review”:http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2007/06/18/long_ago_and_far_away_for_young_and_old_alike/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+A%26E+%2F+Music+-+CD+and+music+reviews%2C+news+and+clips
of Saturday’s Festival Concerts.

This was the Purcell concert I was hoping for on Thursday night, and didn’t quite get then. My introduction to early music as something that could really sound different was hearing the Deller Consort do ??Come, come ye sons of art?? on the radio. I still sing some of those tunes to myself when I’m feeling particularly exhuberant (as I was after this concert).

Besides the florid and exuberant theater music, this concert also included some of the music written for the rich culture of 17th century amateur music. A setting for guitar and voice by Cesare Morelli and Samuel Pepys of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy was particularly illuminating.

h3. You too can play this music.

Everybody who plays with “my group”:htto://www.windband.html who was there wanted to sing the catch, ??Sir Walter enjoying his damsel one night??, so I woke up early on Sunday morning and “transcribed it”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/414.html.

There are other catches by “Purcell”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#44 on this site, and there will probably be even more in the future. Most of them are also in the “drinking songs book”:http://www.laymusic.org/drinking.html.