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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
A Hearty Hispanic Christmas
December 14, 2001
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By Kaneez Munjee
El Mundo's "Villancicos y Cantadas de Navidad" in Palo Alto on Friday night was a program and performance that truly banished all cares, catching the listeners up in the cadence of song and dance. Directed by guitarist Richard Savino, the group featured Jennifer Ellis, soprano, and Jennifer Lane, mezzo-soprano, in a lively set of mostly Latin American villancicos from the 17th and 18th centuries.
The festive decoration at the First Lutheran Church set up a warm feeling in the room and, with the intimate nature of the space, made it a perfect venue for the concert. Much of the program was sacred music — Christmas cantadas, many of which were at least as rhythmically vital and evocative of dance as the secular villancicos which opened the program. El Mundo showed itself expert in bringing the rhythmic impulse of the Spanish and Latin music to the fore. It seemed as though the entire group might well have started dancing if they hadn't been holding onto music or instruments.
Antonio de Salazar's "Tarara qui yo soy Anton" nearly got the audience dancing with its energetic and joyous performance. Even more passionate was Juan Garcia Zespedes' "Convivando está la noche." In expressing the passions of this piece, Ellis and Lane proved themselves versatile singers with an intense flair for the dramatic that came out clearly in Roque Ceruti's comic duet "A cantar un villancico." Though it was not the most engaging music of the evening, Lane and Ellis made it a resounding success through their dramatic rendering.
Another piece which stood out more for performance than content was "Ya que el sol misterioso" by José de Orejūn y Aparicio. One of two pieces on the program not obviously influenced by dance, this recitative and aria stepped into a different musical world. Lane showed herself completely at home in the style and was able to feature a gentler quality to her voice, which did not have many other opportunities to show. Ellis' most moving moments came in Juan del Enzina's "Ay triste que vengo," particularly lovely when she was accompanied only by John Dornenburg on viol, the two of them warmly filling the whole church. In most of the pieces which Ellis and Lane sang together, Ellis took the upper part. The effect was however quite wonderful when they switched, both singers having the flexibility to interchange in this way. Their gentle duet "Jesús, Jesús" by Manuel Joseph Quiroz was especially beautiful, the pair ending so perfectly together that their sounds merged into one voice. El Mundo's six instrumentalists gave excellent support to Ellis and Lane but shone individually as well. The group's varied programming allowed most players to have some solo moments, and this wove in well with the flow of the vocal pieces. Among the highlights were violinists Carla Moore and Lisa Grodin's impeccably wedded playing of Enzina's Triste Espaóa, Savino's intimate sounds in Santiago de Murcia's Fandango, and Yuko Tanaka's performance of Fray Antonio Martin y Coll's Bayle de Grand Duque, the harpsichord seeming to incorporate the sounds and styles of all the instruments at once. Peter Maund on percussion had the most unexpected (but therefore all the more arresting) moment in the spotlight — a tambourine verse in the final piece "Convivando está la noche."
There were a few false notes, rhythms or ensemble glitches scattered throughout the evening, but El Mundo's vibrancy made those moments utterly irrelevant. The group's energy and enthusiasm more than persuasively conveyed the spirit of the music. The audience showed its appreciation by its spontaneous applause, the entire room filled with foot-stomping by the end of the concert, which came too soon. The dedication of this concert by the sponsoring San Francisco Early Music Society to Joseph Spencer, a recently deceased dean of early music in the Bay Area, seemed most fitting. (Kaneez Munjee is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at Stanford University, a singer, and editor of the newsletter of the California Bach Society.) ©2001 Kaneez Munjee, all rights reserved |