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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
MusicSources Ensemble Vermillian
August 18, 2006
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In Translation By Mickey Butts
It's always a challenge to the ear to experience a piece you've heard many times, played in a completely different way. Marin Marais' drivingly intense Sonnerie de Sainte Geneviève du Mont de Paris is written for violin, viol, and continuo but was played on Friday night at MusicSources in Berkeley on a recorder instead of the violin, with a baroque cello added to the viol and harpsichord.
The breathy, plaintive sound of the recorder isn't what you expect to hear replacing the much richer violin. But according to Ensemble Vermillian, that's the kind of thing musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries did all the time for kicks, substituting instruments as a form of improvisation. Once you got used it, it was an intriguing thing to hear.
Ensemble Vermillian (Frances Blaker, recorders; Barbara Blaker Krumdieck, baroque cello; David Morris, viola da gamba; and Katherine Heater, harpsichord) likes to build concerts out of music Blaker has painstakingly transcribed, sometimes transforming solo pieces into chamber works and other times making substitutions for the chamber music combinations originally intended, in the spirit, they say, of the "Baroque ethic of reusing and recycling." "I love violin music but cannot play the violin," Blaker says on the group's CD Stolen Jewels, "so I steal the music and rearrange it for my own instrument." In eco- and early-music-friendly Berkeley, it's a perfect sensibility.
A house concert like no other
The ensemble — half from North Carolina and half from Berkeley — played a concert of French Baroque chamber music at the delightful 50-person salon known as MusicSources, founded in 1986 by the now departed Bay Area early music pioneer Laurette Goldberg.
Occupying a two-story home on the tree-lined intersection of the Alameda and Marin Avenue in north Berkeley, MusicSources is an unusual venue — part home, part concert hall, part museum, part library, part classroom.
Harpsichords are stacked around the upstairs bedrooms like oversize luggage — a veritable wayward home for stray instruments — surrounded by a treasure trove of early music books and scores. Downstairs, the front parlors look something like automobile showrooms, only jam-packed instead with sleek harpsichords, some for sale. The music takes place on a barely raised stage, in what feels like a great big living room, down the hall (or through the kitchen) from the front door. Behind the stage are views of the neighbors' backyards.
It was the perfect location for the intimate chamber music on display. The players, some of them recognizable names from the area's top early music ensembles, whipped through a mix of pieces by François Couperin, Louis Couperin (Le Grand's uncle), Jean Féry Rebel, Marin Marais, and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, the child prodigy composer and the first woman in France to write an opera.
The music begins
The grandest statement on the program was the de la Guerre Sonata in D Minor, which began the second half. Originally written for violin and continuo, here a recorder replaced the violin, and was joined by the viol and cello. In the presto sections, Morris displayed magnificent fretwork on the viol and Blaker had virtuoso moments on the recorder, while Krumdieck and Heater laid down tightly aligned continuo lines on the cello and harpsichord.
Heater later shone in a harpsichord solo on Louis Couperin's Pavanne, written unusually in F-sharp Minor. In her brief remarks before the piece began, Heater explained that the piece was "on the edge of what was possible at the time, playing with sound and harmony, and still experimenting with what the harpsichord should sound like." Heater's light, sensitive playing, always attentive to the phrasing of the line, brought out the piece's sometimes startling chromatic shifts.
Highlights of the first half of the concert were Tombeau de Monsieur Lully by Rebel and Les Baricades Mistérieuses by Couperin. The Rebel was a typical memorial of the time, this one to the great composer Lully. The viol and cello were sensitive to the interplay of the competing lines, even as the lightning-fast cello and recorder lines raced by and the harpsichord established a firm rhythm. At times the whole thing skipped along so fast that all you could hear was the mad buzzing of the strings. Like Marais' Sainte Geneviève, it was the head-banging music of its day.
In the Couperin, a harpsichord solo, Heater elicited a gorgeous legato sound out of her instrument, as she slowed to touch the notes ever so lightly and precisely for emphasis. It was a fine effect that added to the trancelike quality of the repeated passages. It was not what you might expect from a piece whose title refers to either "barricades" or "women's undergarments." But such loose translations, and thoughtful transcriptions, were a key element of the evening's charm.
(Mickey Butts is executive director, editor, and publisher of San Francisco Classical Voice. His writing has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Food & Wine, The Financial Times, The Industry Standard, Wired, and The San Francisco Chronicle.)
©2006 Mickey Butts, all rights reserved
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