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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
Olivier Fortin
March 17, 2007
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Grounds for Praise By Michelle Dulak Thomson
We in the Bay Area are famously spoiled with good Baroque string playing, even (dare I say it?) a little spoiled with good playing of 17th-century Austro-Germanic string chamber music. All the same, anyone who enjoys Heinrich Biber, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, and Georg Muffat — a category that, in my experience, includes nearly everyone who has heard any of it well-played — couldn't help but rejoice that the San Francisco Early Music Society's brought the Québeçois Ensemble Masques to the Bay Area last weekend.
Count this another SFEMS triumph. Not only did it introduce Bay Area audiences to an unfamiliar and uncommonly accomplished ensemble, it also highlighted a slice of repertoire less familiar to most listeners than the great Baroque violin extravaganzas from the same region.
Ensemble Masques is stylishly led from the harpsichord by Olivier Fortin. The violinists, Sophie Gent and Chloe Meyers, are likewise elegant players — the former a little brighter and brasher, the latter a little suaver and silkier, yet not so different as ever to sound incompatible when playing in consort. (Think of Gent rather as Elizabeth Blumenstock to Meyers' Kati Kyme, all you readers familiar with the Bay Area early-music scene.) Below them come three terrific viol players, Elin Söderström, Mélisande Corriveau, and Josh Cheatham — the last billed in the program as playing violone, though in the event he played only viol.
The program, heard Saturday at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, was a tightly designed and obviously well-honed one. (The group's most recent CD, Mensa Sonora: Biber and His Contemporaries, Analekta AN 2 9909, contains almost all the same music, and in the same order, to boot.) The focus, apart from one spectacular viola da gamba sonata by one Augustinius Kertzinger, was not on the extravagantly virtuosic side of the 17th-century German/Austrian Baroque, but rather on the less familiar and less brilliant ensemble pieces.
Biber, not surprisingly, was the framing material, the bread of a multitiered sandwich. Opening and closing the recital were the two five-part pieces from his 1676 Sonatae tam aris quam aulis servientes (Sonatas suitable to the altar or the court). These are swift successions of miniature (most well under a minute long), jewel-like movements, with seven or eight contrasting sections to a piece.
In a similar vein were another Biber work, the Sonata III from the 1683 Fidicinium sacro-profanum (Sacred-profane violin music), as well as the one work of Schmelzer on the program, Sonata VII from his 1662 Sacro-profanum concentus musicus (Sacred-profane musical consort). The remaining piece of Biber was Pars I from the 1680 Mensa sonora (Sounding table). The Mensa sonora pieces are in only four parts, and the movements are somewhat longer and more elaborate than those in the other collections. This one has a particularly attractive Ciacona on a ground a little more involved than the familiar descending tetrachord (a four-note progression bounded by an interval of a perfect fourth).
Grounds were a favorite device not only of Biber, but of most of his contemporaries all over Europe. Just before the work from Mensa sonora on the program came a marvelous, closely knit Sonata a tre viol da gamba by Johann Michael Nicolai, which closed with a fine descending-tetrachord Ciacona. Then after intermission we heard one of Buxtehude's far-too-little-known sonatas for violin, viol, and continuo (BuxWV 272), which proved to be two intricate and substantial ground-bass movements separated by a tiny slow movement. Apart from the Kertzinger — a brief but thrilling tour de force of viol technique brilliantly brought off by Cheatham — the Buxtehude was the most overtly virtuosic music on the program. Gent, Cheatham, and Fortin did it proud. The remaining work was the Sonata II from Muffat's 1682 Armonico tributo. This is music on a different scale from the rest of the recital's repertoire, its nine movements each running two or three minutes, and as rounded and polished as anything in a Corelli concerto grosso. Even that's unfair, because Muffat's craft, or at any rate his imagination, outstrips Corelli's. The Sonata II's penultimate movement, for example, contains a slow descent, laden with suspensions, through two whole octaves in the violins. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder halfway through whether the composer really will carry it all the way to the bottom — and then he actually does. Playing the inner parts of the Muffat on viols inevitably disadvantages them against the more robust violins on top, which seemed to me a pity. Then again, Muffat's celebrated preface to the publication of Armonico tributo pointedly claims that the music will work fine if you leave out the third and fourth parts altogether, so I can hardly complain when they're there, even if inconspicuously. Most of the time, Ensemble Masques handled the inevitable balance issues between the violin- and viol-family instruments sensitively and well, with the two families dovetailing beautifully in a piece like the Ciacona from Mensa sonora. One thing about Saturday's concert: I've never heard such tuning problems from a Baroque ensemble before. Not intonation problems, just tuning problems. Everyone played exceptionally well in tune. But every piece was preceded by a prolonged (and I do mean prolonged) bout of tuning. The seven-minute work from Mensa sonora even got a bout of tuning halfway through. And Fortin once sprinted up the aisle to fetch a harpsichord tuning key so as to adjust one of his own strings — a thing I've never seen happen midrecital. Put it down to air travel, I suppose. The encore was a stately and chromatically tinged Pavan by Dietrich Becker, exquisitely played.
(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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