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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
January 30, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
A concert of 15th-century instrumental music is a rare enough thing around here that even Laurette Goldberg, in introducing
Ciaramella at MusicSources Sunday afternoon, laconically commented that her expertise started in the following century. Ciaramella
— on this occasion a septet of winds and organ — is basically a crack Renaissance wind band writ small, whose players
know several instruments each. The program's ensemble bio says that "Ciaramella" is both the Italian word for "shawm" and the name
of a girl in a Medieval tale, whose dress (like the instrument's body) is full of holes, and who knocks men flat whenever she opens
her mouth. The shawms Sunday didn't actually cause any concussions, but they were undoubtedly powerful.
The MusicSources audience was warned that shawms are outdoor instruments, not designed for small, enclosed spaces. The warning was
unnecessary. Thirty years ago a shawm playing close by might be useful if you wanted to, say, strip some peeling paint off the side
of your house. The shawms of today aren't, so far as I know, materially much different from the ones used thirty years ago, but the
sound-ideal and the technical level sure are — at least in the hands of Ciaramella's Adam and Rotem Gilbert, Debra Nagy, and
Doug Milliken. It's still a keenly penetrative sort of sound, but more "70's Leningrad Philharmonic oboe" than "gas-powered yard-
work implement" — dense and forceful and buzzy, sure, but undeniably attractive, and used with considerable intelligence and
skill.
 In fact the shawms were the mediators of the "outdoor" parts of the program, managing to blend with the bagpipes at one level of a big ensemble piece like "Mit desen nywen iare" (an anonymous New Year's carol that Ciaramella rendered with a bagpipe, two shawms, two sackbuts, and a tabor), while keeping peace with the sackbuts below, the whole making one glorious, big, jolly-sounding noise. (That was supposed to be the concluding piece, but there was appended a much more, shall we say, rustic number whose title I did not quite catch but which evidently translates to "Festive Roast Beef." Indeed!) On a smaller scale the shawms were paired with slide trumpet (Greg Ingles) in a pair of Ciconia motets, and variously with a sackbut or two later on. And they came into their glory with an arrangement of Heinrich Isaac's "Fortuna desperata," with added voices by Agricola: four shawms (including one monstrous great one rather like a Renaissance heckelphone) and two sackbuts — a magnificent ensemble sound. That "Fortuna" came after Isaac's original and a Busnois setting of the same tune, which was typical of the ingenious way the program was set up: short, thematic sets, each for "soft" or "loud" consort, often based on elaborations of a single tune. Occasionally the extraordinarily nimble-fingered Ciaramella organist, Mahan Esfahani, would intervene between sets with an organ intabulation from the Buxheimer Orgelbuch. I'm not certain what instrument he was using, but it was very compact and very clear, and he played brilliantly, even a shade too much so for my taste. I had the uneasy feeling that he wanted to keep the original tune fast enough, not only so that a 15th-c. audience would recognize it, but so that we could — and even then, it wasn't his keeping the tempo so much as insisting on the tactus, not bending even when the intabulation threw a few dozen notes in his face at once. It has to be said that it was bravura playing; I've certainly never heard an organist move that fast.
The soft-consort (recorder) sets, oddly, didn't come off so well as the "shawmy" ones, despite being superficially more suited to the room. Partly it was the lack of voice, I think. Nearly everything on this program was originally vocal music, and even over the course of an hour you start longing for words. And if you're told what the words are in a particularly passionate line of Ciconia's "O rosa bella," so that you'll understand the line when the first recorder plays it, you start pining for real words even more, however deft the playing. Rotem Gilbert certainly got around the part with a dexterity that would be improbable in a human singer (there are places in that piece, and the other Ciconia pieces, that many a modern singer would call flat-out impossible). But there just isn't the pathos in a recorder that there is in a human throat. Not in this music, anyway. The other problem on the recorder side was simpler: the recorder ensembles weren't ever quite in tune, and this is music where intonation makes a very large difference. Busnois' "A vous sans autre Robinet se veult," for three equal parts, put the problem rather cruelly, with all its fifths, octaves, and unisons (Unisons especially). It was a vexing thing, and one that marred nearly all the soft-consort pieces to one degree or another. All the same, this was brave work by an ensemble treading one of music's rather-less-traveled paths, and doing it remarkably surefootedly. I hope to hear more of them. Soon.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America,
and The New York Times.)
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