Critic’s Notebook: Barokksolistene and their Alehouse Sessions at the Konzerthaus

Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene The Alehouse Sessions (Rubicon, 2017) US | UK | DE

Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene The Image of Melancholie (BIS SACD, 2014) US | UK | DE

Jolly Musicke Till You Drop

Hip vibes at the Norwegian baroque hoedown

For the most part, the crowds pouring into the Konzerthaus on Thursday evening surged up the grand staircase straight into the Great Hall: Mahler’s Ninth, Rattle conducting! The high temple of music was calling. Those who took a turn a little further down the foyer, meanwhile, found considerably lighter fare waiting behind the doors of the Mozart-Saal. Nothing lowbrwo, mind you—Bjarte Eike and his Norwegian Barokksolistene are a superb early music outfit. But their motto (“It’s just old pop music”) already hints at the fact that the promised Alehouse Sessions probably aren't too darn serious.

This baroque watering hole promised Henry Purcell, English shanties, dance, ballads, and traditional tunes. You’d need to have known your Purcell pretty well, though, to pick him out from the charming tangle of virtuosity, comedy, and kitsch. The dramatically—even theatrically—conceived program, about ten years old now, cheerfully plops Purcell’s "Virgin Queen" next to a sea shanty with a Bach riff rising suddenly from the hand harmonica. Bass, percussion, and guitar solos are handled the way they’d be in a jazz club.

The result is less "classical" than when Berlin’s Lautten Compagney tackles similar material, and not as relentlessly dramatized as comparable projects from Ireland’s Heresy Records. It’s just a bunch of cool old dads in mildly hipster=casual carb, noticeably graying hair, beers in hand, having fun with the music and goofing around a good deal. Who could possibly be curmudgeon enough to hold that against them—even if the slow-motion fight scene staged at the end finally tipped this early-baroque hoedown definitively into slapstick territory. Well, if clap-alongs and audience participation were not your thing, then you might have felt a sense of mild vicarious embarrassement. As it was, everyone got the right turn at the Konzerthaus; the crowd in the reasonably well-filled Mozart-Saal positivley lapped it up and responded with enthusiasm to everything that was on offer. So much so, Barokksolistene could almost have forgone the plants in the audience, that goated the audience into the right responses.

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Critic’s Notebook: More English than Toast with Marmite and Cheddar, Fair Oriana

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Resonanzen-Festival: Very charming, indeed

A delightfully frothy mix of British, all-too British baroque from Fair Oriana at Vienna’s Resonanzen Festival.

“Resonanzen“, the annual early music festival of Vienna‘s Konzerthaus, continues and on Sunday had arrived on Venus. It’s an astoundingly British planet, it turns out, courtesy the vocal duo Fair Oriana, who offered a program of better- and lesser-known English composers and those who made their living on that sceptered isle, this other Eden, demi-paradise. The program was accordingly tailored to fit the love goddess theme and was backed by a minimalist combo of cembalo, viola da gamba, theorbo (and baroque guitar), oboe (and traverse flute), as well as the amiable narrator Timothy Vaughan.

With their golden hair, golden dress with vertical folds, and classical gesturing, the two singers – Fair Oriana-founder Penelope Appleyard and Lucinda Cox (the replacement for the other co-founder, Angela Hicks) – looked as though two of the caryatid columns had flown over from the Musikverein across the road. The way these two sopranos – with similarly bright, piercing timbre; Appleyard’s a little starker, brittle; Cox a little warmer and more diffuse – presented Purcell, Pepusch, Handel & Co., was most charming, indeed -- in its gentle, genteel way downright innocent.

Penelope Appleyard had also provided the texts – faux-Shakespearean, dotted with anachronistic modern references – that Timothy Vaughan read, in English, to the amusement of the involved audience. With a carefully measured dosage of harmless ribaldry, he kept the audience chuckling along. And when the band returned after the break wearing, wait for it, sunglasses all; a baseball cap here, a leather jacket there: my, what merriment this caused. There was a heavy whiff of pre-Raphaelite music-theatricality in this, combined with the guileless charm of a college theater production – and the whole thing was more English than toast with marmite and cheddar. Handel’s “As steals the morn” und Purcells “Now that the sun” closed this pallidly-attractive, entertaining evening.

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Photos © Manuel Chemineau

Briefly Noted: Nyman for Viols

M. Nyman, No Time in Eternity (inter alia) / H. Purcell, Airs, I. Davies, Fretwork (released on April 19, 2019) Signum Classics SIGCD586 | 67'51"

One of the benefits of the historically informed performance movement has been the revival of instruments lost to history. Among these is the viol consort, made popular again by groups like Fretwork, founded in 1986. Their latest disc brings together recent music for viol consort by English minimalist composer Michael Nyman and a few airs by Henry Purcell, arranged for viol consort by Richard Boothby, co-founder of Fretwork, and Silas Wolston.

Among the newest pieces is Nyman's song cycle No Time in Eternity, set to texts by 17th-century poet Robert Herrick. Premiered by French countertenor Paulin Bündgen and Ensemble Celadon in 2016, it is in excellent hands here with the extraordinary Iestyn Davies. The British countertenor's renditions of the three Purcell airs are gorgeous, as to be expected. He is equally radiant in Nyman's remarkable Self-Laudatory Hymn of Inanna and her Omnipotence, set to a curious ancient song text to the Sumerian goddess.

The two songs from Nyman's score for the film The Diary of Anne Frank border on pop music, pretty but not profound, including "If," which gave its name to the disc. The Nyman pieces without Davies's voice are less successful, especially the somewhat monotonous Music for a While, entirely overshadowed by the Purcell song from which Nyman drew the harmonic progression. Of more interest is Balancing the Books, Boothby's arrangement of a wordless piece Nyman composed originally for the Swingle Singers.

Dip Your Ears, No. 236 (The Diaphanous Elegance of English Baroque)

H.Purcell, M.Locke, Orchestral Works Vox Orhcestra, Lornezo Ghirlanda DHM

On this most recent disc of the youngish Vox Orchesta under Lorenzo Ghirlanda, two of the finest pre-Haendelian English baroque composers are combined in some of their ‘greatest orchestral hits’: Henry Purcell (1659-1695) and Matthew Locke (1621-1677). What they have in common is a very fine, very ingratiating, never dry, never blatant or gaudy style of early baroque. As the booklet rightly points out, the English – long before Bach – combined European baroque styles to their own end: Operatic-Italian baroque with Courtly French dance, shearing the music of any excess in the process. The result, rather than faceless international baroque, is actually an appreciable, ‘very British’ style of its own. The orchestral collections from Purcell’s King Arthur, Dioclesian, The Fairy Queen und Locke’s The Tempest (replete with a few orchestrated arias) give the impression of a bracing collection of free-wheeling de-facto dance suites. The instrumentalists and especially the rocking continuo group of the HIP Vox Orchestra, founded by band leader Lorenzo Ghirlanda in 2015, makes you chair-dance all along. All properly measured, of course – the composers are English, after all – but most decidedly delightful!

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Beauty, the Best Advocate

Charles T. Downey, Derek Jacobi and Folger Consort team up for evening of Shakespeare and Purcell
Washington Classical Review, October 2

Handel and Haydn Society, Still Kicking

Haydn, The Creation, Handel and Haydn Society, H. Christophers (CORO, 2015)

The Handel and Haydn Society is still around. In fact, the group celebrated its 200th anniversary last year and marked that achievement with a concert on Saturday night at the Library of Congress. In the ongoing takeover of American choral institutions by British choirmasters, Harry Christophers, founder of The Sixteen, has led the organization since 2009. The program offered here, ranging from Gregorian chant to a new piece commissioned from Gabriela Lena Frank, aimed to prove that the group, now reduced to twenty-some singers, has expanded beyond the stylistic boundaries implied by its name.

The quality of voices heard varied, with excellent solo contributions here and there, especially from soprano Margaret Rood, heard in pieces by minor composers like James Kent (1700-1776) and Thomas Linley (1756-1778), from the Society's 1823 music publication The Old Colony Collection of Anthems. Tenor Stefan Reed gave a gorgeous rendition of William Byrd's tear-soaked lament on the death of his beloved teacher, Thomas Tallis, ending with the poignant lines, "Tallis is dead, and Music dies." A quartet, led by Rood on soprano, gave an elegant performance of the "Agnus Dei" movement from Byrd's Mass for Four Voices, skilfully layering all those aching suspensions in the "Dona nobis pacem" section.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, America’s oldest ensemble offers a taste of the new (Washington Post, February 22) Steve Smith, Handel and Haydn holds a night of festivity and history (Boston Globe, November 24, 2015)

The results were not as felicitous in the choral performances, with a lack of unity in the male voices especially, noted right from the opening of the first piece, the plainsong hymn Veni creator spiritus. The balance of voices was uneven in Renaissance selections by William Byrd, but there was plenty of volume for the climaxes of Gabriela Lena Frank's My angel, his name is freedom. The chorus seemed the most confident on two double-chorus motets by Bach, although the fast tempos chosen by Christophers in Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied required the sacrifice of some clarity in the melismatic passages. Given the considerable intonation and ensemble woes of the string players in this performance, two pieces for strings by Purcell should have been omitted from the concert entirely.

Anne Sofie von Otter @ LoC

Sogno barocco, A. S. von Otter, S. Piau, S. Sundberg, Ensemble Cappella Mediterranea, L. García Alarcón (released on August 28, 2012) Naïve V 5286 | 71'

As noted yesterday, Anne Sofie von Otter is a versatile singer; but maybe not able to do everything. Her recital at the Library of Congress on Tuesday night, in a packed Coolidge Auditorium, had some high points, but it raised eyebrows, too, and not just mine. Her renditions of John Dowland's pearl-like lute songs came nowhere near the artful grace of Iestyn Davies in his Dowland recital, when he also partnered with lutenist Thomas Dunford last year. There were moments of vocal strain, probably related to being at the end of an American tour with this program, which exposes Otter's voice at the top in not always pleasant ways. The instrumentalists, Dunford on theorbo and Jonathan Cohen on harpsichord and organ, even got into the act, singing the part-song versions of some of the pieces, in a way that recalled Sting's excursion into Dowland territory a few years ago. This added a certain roughneck charm on Dowland's Fine knacks for ladies, with its wares-hawking text rendered in a street vendor's broad accent.

The later Baroque selections often suited von Otter's voice better, except for when some odd musical characterization drove her to excess, as in the shivering repetitions of Purcell's What Power Art Thou from King Arthur. The composer's more conventional pieces, like Music for a While and especially Venus's Fairest Isle, also from King Arthur, were lovely. At least a partial reason for von Otter's choice of repertory seemed to be based on the oddity of some pieces, beginning with Francesco Provenzale's cantata Squarciato appena havea, which interpolates Neapolitan street ballads, of extremely low, even ribald content, into an artful lament by the Queen of Sweden Maria Eleonora over her dead husband. Recorded on her Sogno barocco album, it is a truly weird piece, and von Otter brought out all its eccentricities, reaching for a tambourine and other percussion instruments to heighten the shift between learned and popular.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Anne Sofie von Otter has chosen to be a singer who is expressive, not excessive (Washington Post, November 19) James R. Oestreich, Review: The Mezzo-Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter at the Frick Collection (New York Times, November 15) David Patrick Stearns, Anne Sofie von Otter at the Perelman: Warm, expansive, charismatic (Philadelphia Inquirer, November 13)

Dunford's solo contributions were some of the best parts of this concert, especially a heartfelt performance of Dowland's Lachrimae Pavan, the instrumental version of his wrenching song Flow My Tears. It reduced me to tears, an unspoken tribute to the victims of the Paris terror attacks the previous Friday, something that Dunford did not need to say aloud. His version of Robert de Visée's D Minor Chaconne was equally touching, a nice connection to the theme of ground bass tunes in the French part of the program -- including Michel Lambert's Vos mespris chaque jour, composed on the same bass pattern as Monteverdi's famous Pur ti miro from L'incoronazione di Poppea. While Cohen provided beautiful continuo playing, his solo pieces, composed for harpsichord by Couperin (Les barricades misterieuses) and Rameau (Les sauvages) became slightly odd with accompanying parts improvised by Dunford on theorbo.

One of the highlights was an austere rendition of Arvo Pärt's My Heart's in the Highlands, from 2000, which introduced a concluding section of recent popular songs (not reviewed). Pärt's original organ part was here split between Cohen playing the longer notes on the Baroque organ and Dunford taking the arpeggiated notes on theorbo. In a twelve-measure pattern, with four measures of the voice declaiming the text on a single note followed by eight bars of instruments alone, the piece has a mesmerizing quality and the combination of these three musicians created a sense of timeless stasis. Since my family's trip this past summer to see where our Downey ancestors came from in Scotland, this poem by Robert Burns and this musical setting have greater meaning for me.

The Library of Congress's 90th anniversary season continues this evening with a concert by Apollo's Fire, the Baroque ensemble based in Cleveland, and soprano Amanda Forsythe (November 19, 8 pm).

Choir of Westminster Abbey

Music for Remembrance, Choir of Westminster Abbey, J. O'Donnell (Hyperion, 2014)

Charles T. Downey, Westminster Abbey’s men and boys choir delights at National Cathedral (Washington Post, October 24, 2014)

The tradition of the men and boys choir is most often associated with Britain, where it is maintained more fervently than anywhere else. One of the exemplars of the genre, the Choir of Westminster Abbey, began a U.S. tour Wednesday night at the Washington National Cathedral. The concert marked the opening of the cathedral’s three-part British Choirs Festival, which in the spring will feature the choirs of King’s College, Cambridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

When one sees such a choir in an evening-darkened cathedral... [Continue reading]

Choir of Westminster Abbey
British Choirs Festival
Washington National Cathedral

Matthew Rose @ Vocal Arts D.C.

Schubert, Winterreise, M. Rose, G. Matthewman (Stone Records, 2013)

Matthew Rose's voice continues to grow, after first striking me as a little gruff and unrounded. The British bass, whose Leporello was one of the best parts of a Don Giovanni at Santa Fe in 2009, opened the Vocal Arts D.C. season on Sunday afternoon, with a lightly attended recital in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. The program had a first half of unexpected music that brought out Rose's strengths, and a second half given over to Schubert's final song set, Schwanengesang (D. 957). It is a powerful voice, and Rose still tends in some cases to hurl it at the music, meaning that there was occasional imprecision of pitch, especially at loud dynamics, but also some truly thrilling listening.

Two longer Purcell songs featured Rose's excellent English diction, with the gloomy recitative of Job's Curse and the depression of the spurned lover in Let the Dreadful Engines of Eternal Will playing well to the dark side of Rose's timbre, especially at the low end. The latter song, on a poem by Thomas D'Urfey, has its silly moments, too, which suited the more buffo side of the voice. Rose and his accompanist, Vlad Iftinca (heard earlier this year with soprano Hei-Kyung Hong), performed these two songs in arrangements by Benjamin Britten, and the modernizing details of the piano part especially added to the appeal. A long song by Carl Loewe, a rambling ballad on an episode from the life of Scottish nobleman Archibald Douglas, was a pleasing curiosity, revealing the reasons why so many composers revered Loewe, whose work is mostly forgotten today.

Other Reviews: Simon Chin, From promising UK singer Matthew Rose, inconsistent recital at Kennedy Center (Washington Post, October 21)

A gentler tone came through in some of the songs of the Schwanengesang set, starting with the opening song, Liebesbotschaft. Here the piano's murmuring brook echoed the singer's line endings, and Iftinca created a stark death-knell accompaniment in Kriegers Ahnung. Rose put the blustery power of his voice -- heard to great effect as Bottom in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Metropolitan Opera and as Shadow in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at Glyndebourne -- to good use here, too. The cathartic crescendi and full-throated outbursts were effective in songs like Aufenthalt and In der Ferne but out of place in others, like Ständchen, where the lack of a truly purring legato was most felt. This set is not really a song cycle, in the sense that Winterreise, which Rose has just recorded, is -- some songs, like the silly ditty of Das Fischermädchen, stick out like sore thumbs. Rose could not quite make these pieces work as part of the group, none more so than the final song, Die Taubenpost, appended to the set by Schubert's publisher. Rose would have done better to omit it, ending the evening on the most chilling and fog-benighted performance of Der Doppelgänger I have ever heard, a grim expression of Heinrich Heine's self-loathing that understandably appealed to the dying Schubert.

The next recital presented by Vocal Arts D.C. will feature soprano Pretty Yende (November 6, 7:30 pm), at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

Ana María Martínez's Fête galante

Charles T. Downey, At Kennedy Center, soprano Ana María Martínez excels with pleasing, lighter songs (Washington Post, January 10, 2014)

A. M. Martínez, Soprano Songs and Arias, Prague Philharmonic, S. Mercurio (2005)

Why singers connect to some types of music more than others often comes down to personal taste, and how music and language sit in the voice. During the recital by soprano Ana María Martínez, presented Wednesday night by Vocal Arts D.C. at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, it was French songs and Mozart arias that were most suited to her pleasing, compact, flexible lyric soprano voice.

It is a voice beautifully suited for the lighter roles in the Mozart operas: airy in “Un moto di gioia,” one of the arias Mozart wrote for a new Susanna in a revival of “The Marriage of Figaro,” and plangent in the slow section of “Vado, ma dove?”
[Continue reading]

Ana María Martínez, soprano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

American Ballet Theater at the Kennedy Center

Marcelo Gomes and Julie Kent in The Moor's Pavane, American Ballet Theater (photo by Gene Schiavone)

American Ballet Theater is back in town for a week-long visit to the Kennedy Center Opera House, a company we last reviewed in their charming Nutcracker a couple years ago. The distinguished touring company, established to bring the best ballet to the citizens of the Unites States and once led by Mikhail Baryshnikov, is now under the artistic direction of Kevin McKenzie, with the talented, envelope-pushing choreographer Alexei Ratmansky serving as Artist in Residence. Its first program, a triple-bill of shorter, more abstract ballets, opened last night, with Anna-Marie Holmes's revision of the classic Marius Petipa choreography of Adolphe Adam's Le Corsaire to open tonight.

George Balanchine's choreography to the music of Georges Bizet's Symphony in C goes back to a 1947 production for the Paris Opera Ballet called Le Palais de Cristal. The more abstract version danced by ABT, premiered in 2001, has no set (staging by Merrill Ashley and Stacy Caddell, lighting by Mark Stanley), just a neutral gray screen as backdrop. The women, who open the work in a group of ten, are costumed in shiny white tutus, with the men in black, further enhancing the sense of a sort of abstract painting set in motion. Balanchine hewed closely to the music, bringing in his soloist in the first movement, here the lively Paloma Herrera, with the theme presented by the solo oboe, for example. She was paired with James Whiteside, who made her glide about elegantly in many lifts. The prettiest dancing was in the second movement, which begins with six women floating in en pointe, with Balanchine again delaying the entrance of his soloist (here Hee Seo) until the oboe solo. The six dancers stood motionless until the fugue, when the music activated them to follow the entrances of Bizet's contrapuntal subject. (For a student work, composed when the 17-year-old Bizet was studying with Gounod at the Conservatoire de Paris, it is a remarkably put-together piece.) Among the dancers Daniil Simkin, male soloist in the third movement, stood out for the height and ease of his leaps and turns and the overall litheness of his movement. The fluttery choreography of the fourth movement matches the agitation of the fourth movement's music, with a group of dancers appearing with each return of the rondo theme, ending up with a large corps at the conclusion.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, American Ballet Theatre works at Kennedy Center attest to a company in fine fettle (Washington Post, April 11) Alastair Macauley, Swirls and Shifts in a Kaleidoscope (New York Times, October 20, 2012) Brian Seibert, For the Love of Shostakovich, the Destroyer (New York Times, October 12, 2012)

José Limón's ballet The Moor's Pavane was next, loosely based on the story of Othello and using appropriately courtly music by Henry Purcell (including Abdelazer, The Gordion Knot Untied, plus a pavane). It is not exactly Shakespeare's Othello but quite similar, a story of a jealous moor like that in the play The Moor's Revenge, for which Purcell wrote the Abdelazer music. Again there is no set, and the overall atmosphere is dark, a black background against which the tall, brutal Moor of Marcelo Gomes, in a rich burgundy robe, is turned against his wife (the white-clad, innocent Julie Kent) by the poisonous friend (danced by Cory Stearns with an almost predatory, homoerotic twist), in a trick that does involve a stolen handkerchief. Ballet's roots in courtly dance, which was the origin of Purcell's music, is continuously evoked by Limón as the four characters more often face one another, in approximations of court dances, than the audience.

While the playing of the small ensemble, with harpsichord, for the Purcell selections was quite beautiful, the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra sounded off-kilter in the Bizet symphony, with far too many splatted notes in the trumpets and horns especially. Perhaps more of the rehearsal time went to the closing work, Shostakovich's peppy ninth symphony, in a new choreography created for ABT by Alexei Ratmansky, which sounded forceful and fun. Shostakovich originally planned to write his ninth symphony as a celebration of Soviet victory in World War II, a work "about the greatness of the Russian people, about our Red Army liberating our native land from the enemy," as scholar Laurel Fay has quoted him. The struggle had been, he wrote, "a war of culture and light against darkness and obscurantism, a war of truth and humanism against the savage morality of murderers," but his plans for a massive work with chorus and solo singers were never realized. After the dreamed-of victory had actually been achieved, with official celebrations in Red Square in May 1945, Shostakovich abandoned what he had completed up to that point and produced a small-scale symphony -- five movements in 25 minutes -- "lacking all pretensions to gravity and majesty, [...] almost the antithesis of expectations," as Fay put it.

The very lightness of the work, its occasional grotesque turns, brought the composer all sorts of trouble from Soviet cultural authorities in the years after its premiere, but it is precisely that giddy wit that Ratmansky seized on in his striking choreography. He plans to integrate this choreography into a trilogy of Shostakovich ballets, to be premiered this spring in New York. Ratmansky told an interviewer that what draws him to Shostakovich is that "You can learn the history of the country from his music." This vigorous, often mysterious choreography, with its stark blacks and whites, its curious gestures -- dancers lying down and falling asleep mechanically, leaping and twisting, large groups in conflict -- holds great promise for the entire project.

The visit by American Ballet Theater continues this evening, with performances of Le Corsaire in the Kennedy Center Opera House, through April 14.

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Mozart Requiem: Realisations, Choir of King's College, Cambridge (to be released this month) Glorious Majesty: Music for English Kings and Queens, Choir of King's College, Cambridge

Regarded as the “pre-eminent representative of the great British choral tradition,” the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, offered a rare performance Sunday afternoon to an audience of thousands at Washington National Cathedral. The choir was founded in 1441 to sing daily services in the college’s wondrous chapel, though it is best known for its annual Christmas Eve radio broadcasts of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, heard worldwide by millions since 1928. The sixteen boy choristers, fourteen undergraduate choral scholars (who sing alto, tenor, and bass), and two organ scholars are led by Stephen Cleobury, who is nearing the thirtieth year of his tenure as Director of Music.

Cleobury planned a safe program of Tudor and English Baroque anthems that the choir undeniably owns, as well as two extended works by Benjamin Britten and a few sacred gems by Verdi. William Byrd’s, O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth Our Queen was a clever way to open the program by giving a reverent, if not penitential nod, with musical cross-relations, to both Elizabeths -- particularly Elizabeth II in her Diamond Jubilee year. On the Octave of Easter, one was slightly dismayed to be so persuasively led back into the depths of Lent with Byrd’s O Lord, in thy Wrath, John Blow’s My God, my God, Look Upon me, and Salvator Mundi. Easter joy was experienced through Byrd’s Sing Joyfully with vocal trumpets heralding the new moon, and Purcell’s I Was Glad with bouncing dotted rhythms.

The quality of the Choir of King’s College’s performance stems from their impeccable tuning, where rainbows of overtones spring from each note, creating kaleidoscopic chords. Though many choirs throughout the world can sing beyond in tune with mild tuning adjustments to find just intonation to access pure harmonics, few have the experience of singing daily services in the King’s College Chapel, with the largest fan-vaulted ceiling in the world, while pursuing academic interests of all sorts -- one can hear the history and seriousness of the place in their singing.

Benjamin Britten’s extended Hymn to St. Cecilia, set to a W. H. Auden text, showcased Britten’s deftness at selecting and merging language and music, as pointed out by Cleobury in his comments to the audience. The choir sang about the patroness of musicians with great poise, letting the text gently unfold. Britten’s delightful cantata and musical menagerie Rejoice in the Lamb closed the program with excellent soloists as the cat Jeoffry who serves God with “elegant quickness,” the Mouse who is “a creature of great personal valour,” and the Flowers who “are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.” The work was expertly accompanied on the organ by organ scholar Parker Ramsay of Nashville, Tennessee, the first American organ scholar in the history of the University of Cambridge.

Ramsay also added Easter flair to the program with J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541, which had a HIP northern continental clarity that showed he is used to sending out sound in harmonic chunks in rooms with grand acoustics to avoid the mush, and can favorably make tempos seem faster than actuality. However, the double trills added at the end of the fugue detracted from its strength. Organ Scholar Douglas Tang gave the singers a breather during the second half of the program with French-Romantic composer Charle-Marie Widor’s Finale from Symphony No. 6, where the exciting upward arpeggios hopefully made the audience grateful Tang did not select Widor’s warhorse, the Toccata from Symphony No. 5.

Best Recordings of 2012 (#1 - 10)

Time for a review of classical CDs that were outstanding in 2012. My lists for the previous years: 2011, (2011 – “Almost”), 2010, (2010 – “Almost”), 2009, (2009 – “Almost”), 2008, (2008 - "Almost") 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.

# 1 - New Release

H.Purcell et al., Dorothee Mields, Lautten Copagney Berlin,
Wolfgang Katschner, Carus 83371

H.Purcell, “Love’s Madness” D.Mields / W.Katschner / Lautten Copagney Berlin Carus

How much is early musicke allowed to rock? Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata do funky things, but the liberties they take receive frowny faces from the purists. Dorothee Mields and the Lautten Copagney don’t need to stray from the score to achieve the same and more. In this medley of songs by Purcell and contemporaries, all about the effects of love, Mields & Co. so dig into their instruments that they bring the house down and blow the cobwebs off decades of well behaved performance practice. Positively addictive and joy-giving, it was days before my CD player yielded to another disc.

# 1 – Reissue

D.Scarlatti, 19 Keyboard Sonatas, Sergei Babayan, Piano Classics 0024

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Davitt Moroney at the Smithsonian

Byrd, Complete Music for Keyboard, D. Moroney (2010) Le Clavecin Français: Marchand and Clérambault, D. Moroney (2007)

On Sunday night, Davitt Moroney brought the series of concerts leading up to the Westfield Center International Harpsichord Competition to its close. In the previous three recitals, by Arthur Haas, Mitzi Meyerson, and Charlotte Mattax Moersch, we had heard only two harpsichords, both large, double-manual instruments from the 18th century. Moroney, an English-born harpsichordist who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, played on all four of the historical instruments from the Smithsonian collection during his recital at the National Museum of American History. The program was a survey of music by English and French composers, but Moroney did not necessarily choose the instrument on which he played each selection according to the date of the instrument or the nationality of the instrument builder. As he explained it, in droll and charming introductions to each piece, the most important thing one learns from playing on historical instruments is that the instrument dictates some of the decisions in how to approach music played on it, rather than the other way around.

Thus he began with Henry Purcell's D major suite, published posthumously by the composer's wife, on a little virginal built by Andreas Ruckers (Antwerp, 1620). Last week, in preparation for my preview article on the competition for the Washington Post, Kenneth Slowik gave me a quick introduction to these precious historical instruments, including the two virginals in the collection. One of these virginals has the peculiar feature, not uncommon in early keyboard instruments, of cleft chromatic keys -- that is, the G♯ and A♭ are tuned to different frequencies, and the player activates them by playing on the upper or lower part of the key, which is split in two. (There are examples of this in early organ pedal boards, too.) The virginal that Moroney played does not have that feature, but it was designed for a quinte tuning, meaning that it sounds a fifth higher than the keyboard indicates. The instrument, played with the musician standing up, has a beautiful, fragile, slightly tinny sound, with a limited compass on the keyboard, to which Purcell's little suite was well suited.

Thomas Wolf, the Washington-area harpsichord builder who has been at all the concerts -- his wife, Barbara, an expert in her own accord, has been tuning all the instruments used for the concerts and competition -- has been telling me some wonderful stories about what instrument builders go through to keep these instruments in shape. The Ruckers has apparently not been played in a concert for a few years, and it had to be re-quilled for this event: the old mechanism uses quills, generally from a crow or similarly sized bird, to pluck the strings. These quills need to be replaced periodically, which causes some issues in how to acquire the wings of recently killed crows. After encountering some problems in this area, Wolf got into touch with the Texas Crow Patrol, which helps control the crow population in the agricultural fields of Texas. As it turns out, Wolf's contact at that organization has a son who is an organist.

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Briefly Noted: Une fête baroque

Une fête baroque, N. Dessay, A. S. von Otter, S. Degout, P. Petibon, T. Lehtipuu, P. Jaroussky, S. Piau, R. Villazón, Le Concert d'Astrée, E. Haïm (released on March 13, 2012) Virgin 730799 2 | 154'11" [Listen]

This past December, Emmanuelle Haïm celebrated the 10-year anniversary of her historically informed performance ensemble, Le Concert d'Astrée. As a retrospective of the composers who have provided their greatest successes -- Rameau, Lully, Purcell, and especially Handel -- Haïm led a gala concert at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, with a starry list of the singers who have worked with her over the last decade. Some excerpts from the concert were shown on in a Christmas Day broadcast on French television (see embedded video below), and this 2-CD set is the result of the live recording made in Paris. The thrill of this sort of event, with so many different singers, including many leading voices, performing only one or a few pieces is that all can throw themselves into their performances without worrying so much about safeguarding some vocal strength over the course of an entire operatic role. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is not the big guns that fire loudest: Natalie Dessay's Cleopatra, Philippe Jaroussky's Rinaldo, Anne Sofie von Otter's Phèdre, least of all R. Villazón's Bajazet.

Standout performances come from less expected places, like soprano Jaël Azzaretti in a high-flying avian duet with Alexis Kossenko on traverso in "Rossignols amoureux" or horn players with serious chops in the hunting aria "A la chasse," both from Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie. Ann Hallenberg adds extensive embellishments throughout "Lascia ch'io pianga" from Handel's Rinaldo, extending the harmony until it almost sounds like Fauré. Patricia Petibon performs a nutty La Folie, from Platée, driven mad by the sound of a portable (a brief spoken introduction, in which a cellphone rings on stage, is at the beginning of the track), adds all sorts of crazy ornaments. Sandrine Piau is plangent of tone in a beautiful rendition of "Piangerò la sorte mia" from Giulio Cesare in Egitto, again with affecting additions to the melodic line on the reprise of the A section. The only drawbacks of the live format are the amount of applause captured in the tracks, a few audience noises, and the fact that Haïm's excessively fast tempo leaves mezzo-soprano Renata Pokupić behind in the dust in Nerone's "Come nube che fugge dal vento" from Handel's Agrippina. One can excuse the obligatory Hallelujah chorus, complete with audience participation, with Christmas having been just around the corner, but not the Pájaros Perdidos-style Latin salsafication of Purcell's Sound the Trumpet.


(Note Haïm's unorthodox conducting style and read the comments on
this post about her being fired from the Opéra de Paris)

Folger Consort and the King James Bible

See my review of the Folger Consort's latest concert in today's Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, Folger Consort marks 400th anniversary of King James Version of the Bible
Washington Post, October 3, 2011

Verily, I say unto you: 400 years ago, the King James Bible was published, the translation of the Bible still most familiar to English-speaking Christians. The Folger Consort marked the anniversary Friday night with a concert in conjunction with the Folger Shakespeare Library’s new exhibit, “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible.” Texts from the King James Bible, or earlier English translations, were presented in a selection of choral music from 17th-century England.

The 12 singers of Cathedra, the chamber vocal ensemble of Washington National Cathedral, performed the choral parts of these pieces with a limpid and finely balanced sound. Director Michael McCarthy focused his singers’ rhythmic ensemble with a clean beat, scaling the dynamics to the intimacy of the room and the closeness of the audience. This made possible many more gradations of soft sound, like the angelic piano moment at the words “Peace in heaven” in the middle of Orlando Gibbons’s “Hosanna to the Son of David,” heard, as it were, through a glass, darkly. [Continue reading]

SVILUPPO:
A little bird tells me that a recording of this program is in the works.

Paul Agnew: 'The treat is only sound'

See my review of the recital by Paul Agnew and friends, at La Maison Française, in today's Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, Music review: Les Arts Florissants
Washington Post, September 21, 2011

H. Purcell, Divine Hymns, Les Arts Florissants, W. Christie

“Music for a while / Shall all your cares beguile,” as English poet John Dryden put it, but who shall beguile the cares of the musicians? Shortly after the Scottish tenor Paul Agnew had sung Henry Purcell’s setting of that text, in a beguiling concert at La Maison Française on Monday night, the harpsichordist accompanying him, Beatrice Martin, felt faint and asked her colleagues to pause the concert in the middle of a dance from Purcell’s G Minor Suite.

Martin and her colleagues, viola da gamba player Anne-Marie Lasla and theorbist Thomas Dunford, recently arrived in the United States with Les Arts Florissants, to perform what is by all accounts a magnificent revival of Lully’s “Atys” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Up to that point, no audible sign of fatigue was evident in Martin, and after the group took an impromptu intermission and reorganized the second half, she played with the same precision and passion as in her magnificent performance at the French Embassy last year. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Allan Kozinn, It’s Not Easy to Be a Goddess’s Boy Toy (New York Times, September 19)

Charles T. Downey, Ensemble Les Folies Françoises plays with vivacity at La Maison Francaise (Washington Post, March 18, 2010)

Tallis Scholars and Folger Consort Together Again

The Tallis Scholars Sing William Byrd Taverner, Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas, Tallis Scholars

The first time that the Tallis Scholars performed in the United States, it was on a concert with the Folger Consort, twenty-five years ago this past weekend. After the planned guest choir for this year's Folger Consort Christmas program, the Augsburg Cathedral Choir, had to cancel because of visa issues, the Tallis Scholars agreed to replace them. (I was happy to break the news in the Washington Post, where at the end of a review of another Folger Consort program, I called it "one of the most fortunate performer substitutions in recent memory.") The somewhat heterogeneous program at times seemed like it had been cobbled together, as if selections from the originally planned concert were fitted in between pieces the Tallis Scholars were ready to sing. A few minor blemishes notwithstanding, this was an extraordinary performance, and a Christmas concert of discoveries rather than dreary revisitings to boot, heard on Saturday night at Georgetown University's Gaston Hall.

Not much of the concert featured the ten singers of the Tallis Scholars on their own: just a mammoth Taverner motet (Gaude plurimum -- for Marian feasts, possibly specifically for Assumption, judging by the quotation of the Assumpta est Maria antiphon at one point) and Byrd's somber Nunc dimittis, neither of which is technically proper to Christmas. In the latter piece, the arching phrase "Lumen ad revelationem gentium" cycled several times through the various voice parts, providing an ingenious example of the intelligent type of singing that makes the group so good, performance that benefits from the understanding of form and compositional technique. Gaude plurimum showed that the group's sopranos have nerves of steel, flying high as the treble part is often so distant from the lower parts. Most of the selections that combined voices with instruments -- viols, recorders, lute, organ or harpsichord -- were even more pleasing, especially two unusual Christmas anthems, Orlando Gibbons's See the word incarnate and Byrd's From Virgin's Womb. The latter -- which I have studied in score but never heard performed live -- alternates between a low treble solo and a four-voice, all-treble quire, or refrain, in rollicking triplets. Even better, although the Tallis Scholars have recorded music by these composers, this was the first time their performance of these pieces reached my ears.

Other Reviews: Tom Huizenga, In the end, Tallis Scholars rock the Renaissance at Gaston Hall concert (Washington Post December 13)

Two settings of the Hosanna filio David text, derived from an antiphon proper to Palm Sunday (the shouts of the crowd as Jesus entered Jerusalem), by Gibbons and Weelkes, could conceivably apply to Christmas, although there is no liturgical tradition of such an association. In both versions, the sound of the instruments and voices together blossomed in fullness. That conclusion was preceded by a rare piece of liturgical music by Henry Purcell, a setting of Laetatus sum (Psalm 121, I Was Glad) -- written not for Christmas but for the coronation of King James II. Between laughing lines expressing joy and an intensely contrapuntal doxology, the words "O pray for the peace of Jerusalem" were set to austere homophony, a pious entreaty. The instrumental selections, at their best, added rhythmic zest to the program, as in the charming romp of Purcell's Hornpipe on a Ground and the pairing of an ornamented instrumental version of the tune Greensleeves with a simple, shortened performance of Thomas Ravenscroft's Remember O thou man. The overwhelming heat in the hall, counteracting a very cold night, played havoc with the intonation of the instruments, in spite of lengthy attempts to tune them. William Billings's Judea made for a merry encore.

Violinist Julie Andrijeski leads a Baroque instrument orchestra for the Folger Consort's New Year concert (January 7 and 8), which brings together several sets of instrumental pieces that depict the four seasons.

Ionarts-at-Large: Britten vs. Purcell, Champions League

H.Purcell, Odes for St.Cecilia's Day, Music for Queen Mary, A.Parrot / Taverner Consort Virgin Classics B.Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Young Person's Guide et al., Pešek et al. / Royal Liverpool Phil., ECO et al. EMI

The overlap of Britten- and Football fans seems to be bigger than you might expect… the many empty seats in the Philharmonic hall of the Gasteig more likely due to the football match of Bayern Munich vs. Internationale Milano that evening, rather than Purcell-Britten. (Although for the Munich Philharmonic’s audience, Britten does constitute risqué programming.)

By the time Andrew Manze elicits the first notes of Purcell’s drum-rolling funeral march of Queen Mary at 7:07PM (the same music that opens Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), the players of Bayern and Inter are still in their hotels, soon to be on their way to the Estadio Bernabéu in Madrid, the home pitch of Real Madrid, where the Champions League final 2010 will take place.

After the In nomine à 7 and Fantazia à 4 and the Abdelazar Rondeau, the grave, sweetly regal Chacony—this all being Purcell channeled through the orchestral medley arranged by Britten—glides along with professional dignity imbued onto it by the slightly reduced forces of the Munich Philharmonic. Then the drums of the repeated funeral march bring us full circle.

7:20PM. In Madrid, the players are climbing out of their buses. In Munich, the ‘bringing Britten to the People’ program gets fully under way. Britten is still a missionary task on the continent: his operas are not nearly as present in the repertoire as their quality would mandate; his orchestral works are rarities on the programs of major orchestras. Few pieces would seem better suited to convince stubborn, habit-inhibited ears of Britten’s music than the Four Sea Interludes: adult Britten in all its uncompromising glory and at his most visceral. Four suites of in lush, animated gray—Northern Sea waves breaking over decks and lapping against the hulls of our expectations.

Arjen Robben, Bayern’s right offensive midfielder, knows the Bernabéu stadium well; the Dutch national played one season for Real Madrid before being dumped onto Bayern for a loss of €11m, deemed by Madrid too injury-prone and, well, not enough Christiano Ronaldo. Creating havoc on any opponent teams’ left side, and his injury problems gone, he became an instant star at Bayern, scoring the crucial goals against Florence and Manchester to advance Bayern to this final. With his congenial French counterpart on the other flank, Franck Ribery, suspended for the match, a Bayern victory will likely depend on whether Inter can or cannot take Robben out of the game.

8:05PM. The Sinfonia da Requiem op.20 recalls the Purcell with its opening timpani strokes, drawing yet more parallels in this very intelligently designed program. The Munich trumpets are in impressive shape—as is the whole brass section—the orchestra’s grunt workers—that night. For all the pacifist intent of the Requiem, the timpani do sound magnificently martial, infernal, then fragmented, and eventually led out of violent disarray by an orphic saxophone line.

If Robben’s genius is akin to the flights of a first violinist or a quick clarinet run up and down the pitch, Mark van Bommel and Bastian Schweinsteiger are the brass section of Bayern—watching the back of their creative front-men and keeping the game of possession and attack that coach Louis van Gaal has taught them to play going. They’re heavy working with a little less glory coming their way, and a fair amount of sliding tackles for good measure.

8:22PM. The last notes of the Requiem fade, moved and contemplative applause uneasily vies with reflection and gratitude. The impression from the audience suggests this to be the most successful part of the evening. But Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” is still up, and Konstantin Wecker, a Munich singer-songwriter, will read the complete (translated) text so that all the music—usually cut—can be heard in a setting that makes sense. He jokes that the attendance—better than feared, apparently—attests a victory of culture over football, but that strikes me as too optimistic. I wouldn’t be there, for one, if I didn’t have realistic hopes of catching most of the game, if only the applause won’t last too long.

Fifteen minutes to kickoff: For the players in the locker rooms nervousness gives way to pure adrenaline, each of them knowing this could be the most important club match of their career. There is less pressure on the Munich Philharmonic players to wind their way through the Guide, and the brass belts out the Purcell-theme (full circle, once more) with weighty glory, eminently suitable as a fanfare to the 22 players that enter the pitch just about at that moment. Taking his bows, Wecker feigns a footballing gene when he comes out donning a Bayern scarf and bringing one for Manze (who doesn’t seem quite to know what to do with it—Beckenham, whence he hails, features only hockey and tennis). If he had any true sense for the game, he’d get off the stage instead—which is what a few players and half the audience seem to await eagerly. Panting, I sit down in the nearest pub, just minutes later, having missed merely 12 minutes of the game so far.

With my allegiance firmly with the red of Bayern, not the black’n’blue of Inter, the Nerazzuri, I could probably have spared myself the rush. Despite nearly 70% possession, twice as many shots, trice the number of corners, Bayern looses on two goals by Diego Milito and—to be honest—never really had a chance. It seems only fair that at least the Britten was excellent.