San Francisco Classical Voice

On Wednesday, Cal Performances presented Trio Alla Francesca at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, in a program of 14th and 15th century French and Italian secular songs. Mezzo-soprano Brigitte Lesne played harp and percussion, baritone Emmanuel Bonnardot played strings (vihuela and vielle), and Pierre Harmon played recorders and pipe and tabor. Guest countertenor Gérard Lesne joined them for this concert, so there was depth and variety on both vocal and instrumental fronts.

To start off the evening, Harmon called the audience to attention with bagpipes. He later played a duet with himself on a double recorder and tossed off an electrifying solo recorder dance — an Istampitta characterized by piquant tuning, virtuoso figuration, and teasing articulation that had us hanging on every note.

The group performed several 14th century motets, in which the two upper voices sang different French texts and the bottom voice provides a chanted cantus firmus in Latin. Listening to the polyglot text, it was hard to imagine the original impact of these works. Did everybody, performers and audience alike, know these tunes and words so well that following them wasn't an issue? Or were the words just fun for the singers and unimportant to the listeners?

As a modern listener I hear these works primarily as instrumental, colored by the differing vocal sounds produced by different words. It helps that each voice of Alla Francesca has a distinct character and that all are masters of rhythmic complexity, modal tuning, and vocal embellishment.

Gérard Lesne uses language and dynamics to great expressive effect. His every "oo" and "ee" drew out the "bitter torment" of the anonymous French "Se vrai secours," and he pleaded with his lady in the Italianate "ahs" of Ciconia's "Ligiadra donna." Bonnardot gave a spirited performance of a virelai by Machaut, "Dou mal qui m'a longuement," singing and accompanying himself on the vielle, with Brigitte Lesne joining in the chorus and adding finger cymbals. When Ms. Lesne sang Landini's beguiling "Amor c'al tuo sugetto," Bonnardot played his vielle for her.

A virelai-motet accompanied by vielle and finger cymbals made a pleasing end to the first half (with birdcalls going back and forth between the upper voices) and returned as an encore at the end of the enthusiastically received concert.

On the weekend, the San Francisco Early Music Society presented Medieval Strings in a concert "Fit for a King." I caught the Saturday performance at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. Mezzo-soprano Karen Clark and string players Shira Kammen and Margriet Tindemans performed songs and dances from the 13th/14th century collection called Chansonnier du Roi.

Clark combines a voice of great natural beauty with a fine sense of the nuances and dramatic force of language. In one song, she revels in the joys of love and eases from sung into spoken poetry. In another, she makes a chatty commentary on the rocky course of love, comparing loving to fiddling (as her partners fiddle away). Her strong gift for narrative impels a dialogue between a woman and her friend about which man she should choose, the poor but handsome and refined or the rich but boorish.

Elsewhere she is a woman aching for her man, who is off on a Crusade, and fearing for his safety. Clark builds the verses — sung without accompaniment — to a powerful climax. Most songs were variously accompanied by vielles and harp, some with the players joining in the singing.

The conversation between the two vielle players was delightful. Kammen played hers violin style, Tindemans held hers like a viola da gamba, and they played as one — sometimes in unison, sometimes trading off on a drone, sometimes tossing musical ideas back and forth in imitation or dialogue, changing meters on a dime and picking up effortlessly on each others' syncopations. They played a series of dances from the Chansonnier and also improvised around verses of the songs, one or the other trading off on a harp from time to time.

The concert ended with a pair of lais, the first played brilliantly, the second sung in Occitan (a language of the south) and embellished with vielle and harp flourishes and colorful instrumental doublings.

(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University [lecturer emerita] and director of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)

©2001 Anna Carol Dudley, all rights reserved