Faithfully Yours

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Medieval secular music has a way of inspiring a startling array of interpretive approaches. There are those ensembles that gussy up their performances with (literally) all manner of whistles and bells, mystical in sound but dubious in authenticity. At the other end are the extreme purists, demanding authenticity to a fault and using only the barest surviving historical evidence to generate “faithful” but lifeless performances.

Ensemble La Rota

Falling somewhere in between is the talented young Ensemble La Rota, a Montreal-based quartet whose credits include winning the 2006 Early Music America Medieval/Renaissance Competition. Historical fidelity is clearly a priority for these performers, as evidenced by their scrupulous study of manuscript sources and organization of a concert program, titled “Heu, Fortuna,” around a series of manuscripts copied during or immediately after the reign of Philip the Fair (r. 1285-1314). But as Saturday’s performance at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church demonstrated, such study can coexist with highly nuanced and sensitive performances, moving beyond the score to accentuate the latent drama and passion contained in this repertory.

Intimacy and subtlety are the hallmarks of Ensemble La Rota’s approach. Trading primarily in delicate-sounding instruments such as the recorder, lute, and harp, the group’s four masterful musicians explored a range of motets, trouvère songs (secular French tunes), and instrumental estampies (dance songs) with unfailing grace. They seem to have settled on a standard performance template, in which a single part or duo begins a piece and other instruments are gradually layered on top during later verses. The effect is supremely elegant, never brash or vulgar no matter how lively the music becomes.

Soprano Sarah Barnes paired a winningly bright tone with engaging stage presence to delightful effect in the solemn opening chanson, Chanterai por mon coriage (I will sing for my heart), attributed to Guiot de Dijon. Communicating a woman’s vow to resolutely bear the absence of her crusader husband, Barnes deftly conveyed the text’s alternating fits of sorrow, fear, agony, and hope. An elegant estampie on this same music followed, arranged by the ensemble’s virtuosic recorder/hurdy-gurdy player, Tobie Miller.

Jehan de Lescurel’s piece titled A vous, douce debonaire, a paean to the noble lady in typical courtly love style, exemplified La Rota’s intuitive dramatic inclinations. Barnes began with a florid, confident declaration of the opening lines “To you, sweet lady, have I given my heart; I will never depart,” ably supported by Miller’s florid recorder accompaniment, Esteban La Rotta’s steady harp, and the sinewy vielle lines of Émilie Brûlé. When these lines recur later in the piece, she gave them a softer, more pleading quality — a touching, highly affective gesture.

Alluring Interplay of Texts

The anonymous Dieus! Comment porra/O regina/Nobis concedas (God! How could I give up/O queen of glory/Grant to us) exemplifies the early motet style, in which texts of various languages and meanings are juxtaposed simultaneously, often generating intriguing thematic intersections. Here the idea of brotherhood provided the connecting theme, the French text extolling the virtues of the protagonist’s Parisian friends and the Latin forming a prayer to the Virgin to hear the pleas of her brotherhood. This intertextuality found a complement in the musical styles: more rapid and florid for the secular lines, steadier and more rhythmically regular in the sacred. Barnes’ rapidly flowing declamation of the French blended beautifully with soprano Miller’s sweet, steady interpretation of the Latin, with Brûlé and La Rotta adding unerring instrumental support.

Another highlight was Philippe de Vitry’s Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta/Merito hec patimur (The tribe that did not shrink/Since the band of thieves/It is fair that we suffer this), a motet declaiming the just punishment given to those taking what did not belong to them. Here Barnes and La Rotta provided the vocals in relatively steady rhythms, contrasted against Miller’s dazzling recorder figurations and Brûlé’s ever-solid support on vielle.

A final note, about the printed program: While photocopies of manuscript sources for the evening’s program offered a welcome addition to the notes, severe misalignments between the order of pieces as presented in the program and how the texts were displayed in the body of the program prompted much frustrated page-turning. Especially on a program sung mostly with a Medieval French accent, where following the text is doubly challenging, this lack of coordination was unbefitting of a program otherwise so finely polished.

Joseph Sargent, a doctoral candidate in musicology at Stanford University, is a professional writer and editor as well as a performer, conductor, and scholar of early music.