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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
Inspired Freedom In Baroque Music
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By Michelle Dulak
The San Francisco Bay Area is America's foremost center of historically-informed performance. Audiences here have the privilege of hearing, day to day, baroque players on a par with any in the world. Even so, Saturday's recital by the English trio "Romanesca," led by violinist Andrew Manze, was an extraordinary event.
Manze is known to American audiences almost entirely through recordings, mainly of seventeenth-century music. They portray a violinist whose combination of absolute technical security and strong interpretive personality is nearly unique among modern violinists, historically-informed or otherwise. Revealed Saturday was that Manze is even better live than on record. His technical command is no product of digital editing techniques. There was hardly a dropped note or a gut-string squeak all evening. But in the energy and fancy he brought to the music he eclipsed recorded performances already celebrated precisely for their energy and their fancy.
The extra flair of the live performances came in harness, it is true, with a goofy showmanship. There was something faintly risible in the sight of this slight, balding, vaguely nerdy figure taking his bow off the string at the end of a piece with a triumphant swoop of the arm. But the playing was nothing to laugh at--except, indeed, in Biber's "Sonata representativa," where laughter was the point.
Manze is something of a renegade among Baroque violinists. In a field where keeping one's chin off the instrument is a mark of superior virtue (one well-known Baroque violinist supposedly fails students in their conservatory jury examinations for a single touch of chin to wood), Manze holds his violin in a firm chin-grip, and cites seventeenth-century authority as precedent. He cultivates a seamless legato, managing through careful control of pressure and speed to downplay or even eliminate the baroque bow's natural difference between up- and down-strokes where he does not want it to be audible.
He uses the upper positions even on the lower strings, often varying a repeated figure by playing it first on one string and then on another. Approaches to cadences in seventeenth-century music frequently involve a frenzied alternation between two pitches, the goal of the cadence and the note a step below; one of Manze's favorite tricks is to play the two notes on different strings, so that the the conflict between them is a contest not only of dueling pitches but of tone colors as well.
All this suggests to some baroque players that Manze is not quite the genuine article--too "modern," too anachronistic, too glitzy. (A well-known baroque violinist of my acquaintance, when I mentioned Manze, muttered derisively about "slash-and-burn" playing.) The impression produced by Saturday's recital, though, was of a subtle and nuanced musical intelligence thoroughly at home in the peculiar atmosphere of the seventeenth-century violin repertoire. This is music that is essentially frozen improvisation. Manze did it the credit of seeming to compose it anew.
The program was about musical freedom, in some pieces within a controlling structure, in others, unfettered. The more fanciful explorations seem to take place without any form or framework beyond the momentary whim of the composer. A motive appears, is repeated, spins tumultuously into another; the music changes and changes again, as though one were turning the dial on a kaleidoscope. Considered as "structure," as something pre-existing the performance, music like this withers and dies. It stakes everything on the performer's ability to sustain the illusion that the performance itself generates the music, that its path is a succession of willful and unruly choices. This is a skill in which Manze has few peers. In sonatas by Castello and Marini from the 1620s, and a later work by Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi, his performances led the listener straight through the sudden twists and the bald non sequiturs. Each sonata emerged as a single, extended sequence of thought.
Other pieces tempered that free play of imagination with imposed structure. They were variations on grounds--repeated bass patterns, or sometimes merely successions of chords. "Romanesca" takes its name from one such pattern, a sequence of four chords most familiar as the underpinning of "Greensleeves," but that generated dozens of works in the early decades of the seventeenth century.
A sonata by Pandolfi on the romanesca appeared towards the end of the first half of the program; another romanesca, by Marini, was the ensemble's appropriate encore--a signature gesture (Manze remarked) to close the final concert of the trio's American tour. The Schmelzer sonata was another ground-bass piece, this time on a descending four-note scale pattern. Here again the improvisatory quality of Manze's playing was striking, but the impression generated was quite different: not the free wanderings of a musical imagination, but the circumscribed and codified expression of musical wit.
Manze's two accompanists, keyboardist John Toll and lutenist Nigel North, well-known soloists in their own right, were each allotted a solo turn. Toll's was a fine, if slightly diffident, performance of a pavan and galliard by Gibbons. North presented two remarkable theorbo pieces by the lutenist Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger. The first, a "toccata arpeggiata" from 1604, was an amazing piece for that date, with a succession of unstable, shifting harmonies that would not have been out of place in a Bach keyboard prelude of a century or more later. It was followed by a piece from 1640 described in the program only as "Balli" ("dances") It was in fact a variation set on yet another ground, the happy-go-lucky four-chord sequence called the bergamasca. The performance was at once elegant and rousing.
Biber's "Sonata representativa" came, perforce, at the end of the program; it is difficult to imagine what could have followed it. The piece is a collection of all-too-realistic animal impressions--a nightingale, a cuckoo, a frog, a hen and cock, a cat, etc.-thinly disguised (with "straight" musical connecting material) as a sonata. Manze's 1993 recording, with its plaintively yowling cat and insolently abrasive rooster, set the modern standard for zoological verisimilitude, but Saturday's performance left it in the shade.
His nightingale sang with only the merest whisper of bow; a few flickering bowstrokes on a single pitch painted a vivid portrait of a quail. The frog, represented by a double-stop of two notes a half-step apart, had audible pitches in 1993. Now Manze delightedly reduced it to a mere crunch of bow on string. The cat and the rooster were bigger and badder than ever, each "meow" more outrageous than the last, the cock's crows fit to wake the dead. After the riot of musical impressions (the last a swaggering depiction of a musketeer, embellished by Manze with an impromptu run of parallel fifths), the deadpan and rather sweet performance of the concluding allemande was a final, delicate touch of humor.
(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)
©1998 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved
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