Baltimore Consort's 'The Ladyes Delight'

Charles T. Downey, High-profile act punctuates Early Music Festival
Washington Post, June 5, 2012

The Ladyes Delight (Entertainment Music of Elizabethan England), Baltimore Consort (1998)

The Washington Early Music Festival returned in force this weekend, and with 32 events scheduled over the space of 29 days, the largest in scope it has ever been. Festival director Constance Whiteside said that the organization even turned away some groups that wanted to perform, in the interest of keeping the event, staffed by volunteers, at a manageable size. While in past years it has focused on a single country’s music, the theme this year is “Vices and Virtues,” which opens up a wider field of possibilities.

On Sunday afternoon St. Matthew’s Cathedral hosted one of the festival’s most high-profile acts, the Baltimore Consort. The program, called “The Ladyes Delight,” featured only a few of the dance tunes from the group’s CD of that name, focusing instead on ballads and other dance pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries. The ensemble’s fragile sound, with the melody mainly in the treble viol and a breathy, low transverse flute, was often murky in the cathedral’s large space. Mindy Rosenfeld’s virtuosic turns on higher-pitched flutes and one magnificently odd French branle — played on three whining crumhorns — set one’s foot tapping the most. [Continue reading]

Baltimore Consort: The Ladyes Delight
Cathedral of St. Matthew
Washington Early Music Festival

Collite, virgo, rosas (poem attributed to Ausonius, sometimes to Virgil)