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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
June 30, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
The San Francisco Early Music Society's summer workshops at Dominican University in San Rafael annually present not only an
opportunity for students to work with some of the best players and singers in the Bay Area's early-music scene, but also a chance
to hear the teachers (some of whom don't ordinarily perform together) in collaboration on the workshop-ending final concerts.
Thursday's finale to the Medieval-Renaissance Workshop was typical of the breed. It was, as one would expect from the players and
singers and the scope of the workshop, a wide-ranging program, inevitably "bitty," but kept moving by swift changes of musicians
and stage setup. Moods, centuries, and timbres were all varied cunningly, so that there was no long stretch of anything, but
constant change.
Of the pieces for homogeneous ensembles, the string sets were the most successful. A pair of trios by the 16th-c. Vincenzo Ruffo
were followed by an intricate and fun four-part piece called "La Todeschina," attributed in the program (with a question mark) to
Giovanni Guami. The players — Robert Mealy, violin, Shira Kammen and Herb Myers, violas, and David Morris, cello —
obviously relished that last particularly; it was first-class interactive chamber music. Mealy, as always, played with the violin
dramatically low on his chest (sub-breastbone); Kammen and Myers both had huge "tenor" violas of the sort that were used in the
sixteenth century but have almost never survived intact into ours. (They sound terrific in a canzona, but they're rather awkward to
get around on in faster music, so nearly all have at some point been "cut down," made smaller.)
The four returned a little later with David Tayler on theorbo to do a Farina pavana, which was a very fine piece but not,
perhaps, quite as well tuned as it might have been. (Mealy, in particular, seemed to be placing one degree of the scale polemically
high, and the other bowed strings weren't quite following suit.)
There were wind sets as well. The opener was a set for two shawms and sackbut (Dan Stillman, the versatile Myers, and Mack Ramsey) of 15th-c. chansons, played with gusto and pungent sound. Later came three pieces of Johannes Ciconia on recorders (Annette Bauer, Patricia Petersen, and Hanneke van Proosdij), which were for me the one real disappointment of the concert. Partly because I so rarely get to hear any Ciconia at all live that I felt obscurely peeved at getting purely instrumental performances when there were fine singers elsewhere on the same program; partly because for all the agility of the players (Ciconia is, rhythmically speaking, extremely intricate stuff, and on that score the players handled it well), the intonation left a lot to be desired. The chronic habit of letting the pitch droop on a long note just before releasing it was particularly annoying. But also this is music full of sudden long stops on fourths, fifths, and octaves, and if they aren't hit squarely in tune, it's almost a matter of indifference whether you then correct the tuning or don't; either sounds unfortunate. Matters were distinctly brighter in the pieces involving mixed ensembles. Bauer, Kammen, and percussionist Peter Maund played a turn-of-the-fifteenth-century saltarello with irresisible verve and groove. This was Maund's first appearance on the program, and he was fantastic, getting a variety of sounds out of a tambourine that I didn't know was even possible. Later, in a pair of Sephardic songs and in a Diego Ortiz recercada,, he switched to a somewhat larger vertically-held frame drum, with the same uncanny range of timbres and the same evident spurring-on effect on his colleagues. In the Sephardic songs they were Mealy, Kammen, Bauer, and Daniel Johnson, the last singing and playing (I think) psaltery. Mealy played vielle here, while Kammen began with a tiny bowed instrument like a pochette, switching to vielle later on, and contributed some (excellent) singing of her own. The Ortiz involved Gail Ann Schroeder on viol, in intricate divisions that she tossed off with considerable flair to the accompaniment of Morris's lirone and Maund's drum. The vocal pieces in general came off well, and incidentally revealed that several of the instrumentalists are fine singers. Jennifer Lane gave a passionate performance of Hildegard von Bingen's O ignis spiritus, supplemented rather fancifully by two other singers and Mealy and Kammen's vielles. An Arcadelt madrigal got a rich, dark treatment, voices on top, gambas, bassoons, and a sackbut below. And to conclude, the whole gang assembled onstage for a work of Francisco de Peñalosa (early 16th century or so), "Arr. T. Zajac." The "arrangement," so far as I could tell, consisted mainly in replacing the original text with verses on the subject of peace taken successively from the Beatitudes, the Old Testament, and the Qu'ran. Yes, okay guys, unobjectionable and wholly predictable message received. It made a grand sound, though.
(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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