The King’s Singers

There were no problems with lack of rehearsal time, or
inexperience in ensemble singing, or questionable blend on the
Tuesday night concert of madrigals about triumph and conquest by
the King’s Singers.

The first half presented English madrigals from the Triumphs of
Oriana, paired with Italian ones from Il Trionfo
di Dori, the Italian Madrigal collection which inspired the
English one.

I went to the concert hoping to hear material that my group would
enjoy singing. I think the first one will be Michael East’s
Hence stars, too dim of light. The serpent wants to
play the bass line. In general, the serpent wants to sound like
bass Jonathan Howard.

The second half was French madrigals, starting and ending with
two Jannequin showpieces, Les cris de Paris and
La Guerre. In between were Josquin and Lassus.
A friend I talked to later wished there had been more Josquin, but
I wouldn’t have sacrificed the showpieces. Madrigals are the
ultimate living room music, but when you can do precision
fireworks like the ones in La Guerre, you should
have a concert stage to do it on.

I was glad they did that one in particular, because the battle
pieces that apparently everyone wrote and played all through the
16th century are often neglected as trivialities in the modern
concert presentations of that repertoire. I think it’s important
to see how musicians were dealing with representing the sounds
they heard (including gunfire). The battle pieces also represent
the birth of movie music, which is still an important part of the
musical landscape.

On my way in to the concert, I talked to some conservatory
students who are here participating in the EMA Young Performers’
Series. One of them was introduced as the best chalumeaux player
in the world, which embarrassed him a little, but there are only a
couple of people playing chalumeaux in public. So I told him
about being the second-best serpent player in the Boston area.

On
the way home, I ran into an MIT musicologist who has used some of
my transcriptions in his statistical analysis of something or
other. He asked about what I was publishing these days, so I
showed him the
new brochure, and he was actually interested in discussing the
problems of getting lilypond
to space unbarred music correctly. A few years ago He wrote a Haskell program
that uses lilypond for very low-level stuff but does a lot of the
spacing and line-breaking on its own, and he says his stuff looks
just like Petrucci, but probably doesn’t work with the current
lilypond.

So I’m feeling quite good about BEMF at the moment.

Les Voix Baroques — The Song of Songs

The Monday evening concert was the typical BEMF
pickup group, that found some really good music. It was all loosely
related the the Song of Songs, including lots with
the bits that made the monks trying to honor their vow of
chastity think very hard about the relationship between Christ
and the Church. (“I sat down under the shadow of him I desire,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste.”)

My two favorites were the lute and baroque guitar duet on an
aria from a Monteverdi opera, and the Purcell motet that closed
the concert.

What my friends and I argued about on the train back to Cambridge was whether
they didn’t sing an encore because:

  • They were a pickup group hadn’t bothered to think of one,
    or had the time to rehearse it if they had thought of it.
  • They’re already trying to figure out how they can possibly do as much
    music as they have left to do this week.
  • The ending Purcell
    was such a perfect ending number.

You can defend all those positions.

If it were my concert, I’d have done one of our drinking songs for an
encore. You really could hear in the motets from the Song of Songs that
these were the same people whe went to the pub later and sang our
Purcell’s and Sermisy’s.

The Globe review is here.
They picked different favorite pieces than I did, although they
also mentioned the lute-harp duet, and they rightly singled out
the singing of soprano Yulia Van Doren as particularly sumptuous.

Rant about Early Music singing for CD’s

I was again really irritated by the “female sopranos on top;
everything else sung by men” vocal forces. For people who can
sing opera, these singers sing ensemble really well, and in the
all-male numbers, there was a good ensemble sound. I can’t
imagine what the historical justification for singing church music
this way would be. I understand saying, “Church music wasn’t sung
by mixed choirs until the 19th century, so ensembles should be all
men or all women.” You can deal with the range of the parts
by either getting boy sopranos (which I’d like to hear more of),
or transposing up or down a fourth (if you can find the basses or
high sopranos).

But putting female opera singers on the top line with no voices
of anything like that timbre on the middle lines is doomed to
producing a really unbalanced sound. Which it did last night. I
think it’s equivalent to saying, “Beethoven was really frustrated
by the pianos of his day, so it’s more authentic to play his music
on a Steinway.” Easier to deal with changing the strings, maybe,
but certainly not more authentic. I love Beethoven on modern
pianos, but if I were taking people’s money for authenticity
(which BEMF does), I would get a fortepiano.

Globe interview with Kristian Bezuidenhout

The Boston Globe kicks off
its BEMF coverage with an
interview
with Kristian Bezuidenhout.

Mostly a “how did you get into this wierd stuff” interview, but
a little bit of a preview of the four concerts he’ll be playing
in.

The interview is also interesting for the quote from BEMF
executive director Kathleen Fay:

If schedules permitted, I’d present Kristian at every single biennial Boston Early Music Festival and in every annual concert series from now until the end of time…

I’ve always suspected that what the BEMF management really
wanted was to find sure-fire performers they could just hire all
the time, instead of the goal those of us stuck in Boston would
like them to have, of showing what’s really happening in the early
music world in all its variety.

I think this goes a long way towards explaining the lack of
brass and reeds, and the opera staging that looks the same every time.

I also spent some time trying to decide whether I’d hire the photographer who took the picture that goes with the article. It’s a good-looking picture, but two years ago, he certainly didn’t look anything like that.

News from the Opera dress rehearsal

Some friends saw the opera dress rehearsal last night, and
wrote me about it.

One said:

BEMF Opera is quite a production. Good dancing, mostly toward the end,
excellent orchestra, costuming and herald’s trumpets. Male voices mostly high tenor or countertenor. A complex plot of ambition, ego and betrayal.

Another said:

Opera is highly recommended but it lasted 3 hrs., 45 minutes last night with
no breaks for notes other than the long & short (stretch) intermissions.
Today they are no doubt madly trying to pare it down a bit. Dancing is
very good, mostly at end of acts, & provides (with one comic nurse
character) some needed light moments so one doesn’t like to make cuts there
– although they probably will.

In response to my asking about reeds and brass in the
orchestra, the first correspondent said:

Two haut-bois, who also play recorders, and a bassoon/dulcian player.

Brass are four long trumpets, with one loop, estimate about as
much tubing as a sackbut halfway out. Hunting calls in harmony,
and some passages as part of the orchestra.

And in reponse to a question about how good the ensemble
singing was:

Most of the singing is solo narrative. There are some wonderful duet
passages where the voices entwine in delicious canon.