San Francisco Classical Voice

At least one audience member doubted that such a sound was being naturally produced. I heard him grumble at intermission about the instruments being transformed through a microphone. Perplexed, I peered closely at the stage to ascertain what had so disturbed him. Contact microphones were, indeed, attached to the instrument bodies, but they did not alter the players' sounds in the least. They were attached to electronic tuning machines, which the ensemble consulted between pieces.

Unfortunately, this tuning practice proved to be one of the most disturbing distractions of the evening. Most of the pieces on the concert's first half clocked in at somewhere between four and six minutes. The brevity and variety of these pieces, coupled with the fact that the ensemble stopped to tune before every work, led to a grab-bag atmosphere that, depending on your perspective, may have seemed either delightfully varied or irritatingly incoherent. In addition, after the opening work, the ensemble turned to a collection of assorted music spanning five centuries. Featuring compositions from Machaut to Castello, the program was not for listeners who appreciate unified and well-integrated wholes. I, for one, enjoyed the variety, though a little less tuning adjustment (even if that meant a bit more discordance) might have helped downplay the breadth of variety while pointing out the group's intelligent grouping.

The concert's first half was roughly divided into two large sections. Opening with the Kyrie from Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, the ensemble went on to present other works with French origins. Particularly beautiful were the 15th century virelai settings Maudit soyt and Palle, Palle by Henricus Issac. The latter chanson referred to legends about the Medici family, complete with the famous battle cry of "Palle, Palle, Palle!" The "French" set ended with the chanson known as "Doulce memoire," preserved in the 17th century organ folios of the Spaniard Hernando de Cabezón.

Next, the group turned to a set of Italianate pieces, starting with a canzona by Giovanni Salvatore. After the sonorously beautiful chanson settings, the audience was snapped to attention by Salvatore's spicy chromaticisms and virtuoso fireworks for all four voices in stretto imitation. Not content with one adventurous work, the program crafted a nice crescendo of dissonance, moving through an arrangement of William Lawes's 1663 Division Upon the Pavan to a four-part Fantasia by Henry Purcell. It was hard to believe that things could get any wilder than Purcell's strident dissonances and rapidly shifting harmonic bases. However, Dario Castello is as famous today for the boldness of his stile moderno gestures as he was in his lifetime (as the remarkable number of reprints of his instrumental collections demonstrates). The ensemble's presentation of a sonata originally composed for wind instruments did not disappoint, with its fiery ornamentation in imitative sections and its utterly unpredictable improvisatory strains.

For the concert's second half, the ensemble selected works from the keyboard repertoire. Jacques Boyvin's Suite de premier ton (1690) opened the half. The decision to include organ music springs from historical precedent. In the mid-16th century, Portuguese missionaries brought viols to Japan to use them in church music, due to the paucity of organs there. This practice continued well into the 18th century, so that the YKVC's presentation of Boyvin may have echoed the types of presentations that the players' Japanese ancestors may have heard. The arrangement purportedly imitated the organ work's registral designations through judicious part doubling and tessitura manipulation; I must admit, however, that the whole sounded a bit monochromatic (though elegant) to this critic's ears.

The final set of pieces, all drawn from J.S. Bach's keyboard oeuvre, provided a good deal more variety of color. The first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier was brilliantly arranged for pizzicato strings. Following this delicate presentation, the ensemble demonstrated real sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in Contrapunctus 9 from Art of Fugue. Rather than succumbing to the temptation to "belt out" the fugal subjects, they allowed the music to speak for itself, the interplay of the countersubjects and ornamental figurations clearly audible. This clarity carried over into a pastorale drawn from Bach's organ trio Sonata, BWV 590, where the floating obbligato melodic line was seamlessly presented, despite the fact that it was split between the treble and alto viols.

Finally, Bach's keyboard Toccata, BWV 914, brought the concert to a stunning finish. Once again, the ensemble demonstrated its remarkable ability to split single lines, originally scored for one of the keyboardist's hands, between two (or more) gambas, resulting in wonderfully stereophonic dialogues. The arrangement enjoyed a stellar performance by the group and successfully captured the ad hoc essence of the music of this genre. Toccatas (meaning "to touch") are based on improvisatory models, and the consort's ability to infuse the work with elasticity of tempo and liberal ornamentation demonstrated remarkable flexibility, which any individual keyboard player would have been hard pressed to outdo.

The YKVC may have disappointed some listeners who anticipated a more liberal blend of old and new musics. However, the group's title was not ill conceived. East did meet West through this Japanese consort's noteworthy ability to select, arrange, and place a personal interpretive stamp upon great works drawn from several centuries of the Western musical tradition.