Ensemble La Rota

Falling somewhere in between is the talented young Ensemble La Rota, a Montreal-based quartet whose credits include winning the 2006 Early Music America Medieval/Renaissance Competition. Historical fidelity is clearly a priority for these performers, as evidenced by their scrupulous study of manuscript sources and organization of a concert program, titled “Heu, Fortuna,” around a series of manuscripts copied during or immediately after the reign of Philip the Fair (r. 1285-1314). But as Saturday’s performance at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church demonstrated, such study can coexist with highly nuanced and sensitive performances, moving beyond the score to accentuate the latent drama and passion contained in this repertory.

Intimacy and subtlety are the hallmarks of Ensemble La Rota’s approach. Trading primarily in delicate-sounding instruments such as the recorder, lute, and harp, the group’s four masterful musicians explored a range of motets, trouvère songs (secular French tunes), and instrumental estampies (dance songs) with unfailing grace. They seem to have settled on a standard performance template, in which a single part or duo begins a piece and other instruments are gradually layered on top during later verses. The effect is supremely elegant, never brash or vulgar no matter how lively the music becomes.

Soprano Sarah Barnes paired a winningly bright tone with engaging stage presence to delightful effect in the solemn opening chanson, Chanterai por mon coriage (I will sing for my heart), attributed to Guiot de Dijon. Communicating a woman’s vow to resolutely bear the absence of her crusader husband, Barnes deftly conveyed the text’s alternating fits of sorrow, fear, agony, and hope. An elegant estampie on this same music followed, arranged by the ensemble’s virtuosic recorder/hurdy-gurdy player, Tobie Miller.

Jehan de Lescurel’s piece titled A vous, douce debonaire, a paean to the noble lady in typical courtly love style, exemplified La Rota’s intuitive dramatic inclinations. Barnes began with a florid, confident declaration of the opening lines “To you, sweet lady, have I given my heart; I will never depart,” ably supported by Miller’s florid recorder accompaniment, Esteban La Rotta’s steady harp, and the sinewy vielle lines of Émilie Brûlé. When these lines recur later in the piece, she gave them a softer, more pleading quality — a touching, highly affective gesture.

Alluring Interplay of Texts

The anonymous Dieus! Comment porra/O regina/Nobis concedas (God! How could I give up/O queen of glory/Grant to us) exemplifies the early motet style, in which texts of various languages and meanings are juxtaposed simultaneously, often generating intriguing thematic intersections. Here the idea of brotherhood provided the connecting theme, the French text extolling the virtues of the protagonist’s Parisian friends and the Latin forming a prayer to the Virgin to hear the pleas of her brotherhood. This intertextuality found a complement in the musical styles: more rapid and florid for the secular lines, steadier and more rhythmically regular in the sacred. Barnes’ rapidly flowing declamation of the French blended beautifully with soprano Miller’s sweet, steady interpretation of the Latin, with Brûlé and La Rotta adding unerring instrumental support.

Another highlight was Philippe de Vitry’s Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta/Merito hec patimur (The tribe that did not shrink/Since the band of thieves/It is fair that we suffer this), a motet declaiming the just punishment given to those taking what did not belong to them. Here Barnes and La Rotta provided the vocals in relatively steady rhythms, contrasted against Miller’s dazzling recorder figurations and Brûlé’s ever-solid support on vielle.

A final note, about the printed program: While photocopies of manuscript sources for the evening’s program offered a welcome addition to the notes, severe misalignments between the order of pieces as presented in the program and how the texts were displayed in the body of the program prompted much frustrated page-turning. Especially on a program sung mostly with a Medieval French accent, where following the text is doubly challenging, this lack of coordination was unbefitting of a program otherwise so finely polished.

With Saturday’s brief concert of two divertissements (short operatic entertainments) at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, Magnificat Music Director Warren Stewart and company took another decisive step toward reclaiming Charpentier’s reputation. Delivering a crystalline performance marked by luscious vocal purity and elegant instrumental support, Magnificat captured the vitality and freshness of these charming works, turning the evening into an impeccably refined affair.

Les Plaisirs de Versailles (The pleasures of Versailles; 1682) is house music in the literal sense, originally performed for Louis’ thrice-weekly “fêtes of the apartments” in the main rooms of the Great Apartment of Versailles. Its dramatis personae comprise various pleasures that the Sun King evidently enjoyed in these digs: music, conversation, gambling, and that perennial favorite chocolate. Striking contrasts in instrumentation and style — lyrical airs for La Musique, prattling recitative for La Conversation, solemn tones for the temptations of Comus, the god of festivities — accentuate the central debate over which of these elements best satisfies the king’s pleasures.

Both vocally and in their gestures, sopranos Laura Heimes (as Musique) and Jennifer Paulino (as Conversation) nicely captured the comedic aspects of their characters’ arguments. Finely matched tone colors, keen attention to melodic shape, and vivid stage presence accentuated the elegance of even their most stinging put-downs. Both singers deserve credit for creating vivid personifications of Musique’s campy haughtiness and Conversation’s irksome blabbering. As the purveyor of chocolates, wines, and other delectables, bass Hugh Davies added an appealingly robust and seductive quality to the mix.

Considerably less resounding was the evening’s vocal projection, the one flaw marring an otherwise finely polished gem. Many singers (Heimes and Davies excepted) had difficulty carrying over the orchestra, a crackerjack group of eight players whose superlative accompaniment should not have posed particular problems. St. Mark’s acoustic didn’t help matters, but placement of the vocalists in front of rather than behind the orchestra might have alleviated the problem.

Pastoral Pleasures

Also with a connection to royalty was the evening’s other divertissement, La Couronne des fleurs (The crown of flowers; 1685), a work likely composed for the singers of Marie de Lorraine, Duchesse de Guise and cousin to Louis. Freely adapted from the prologue of Charpentier’s comedy-ballet Le Malade imaginaire (The imaginary invalid; 1673, with text by Molière), this work emphasizes the pastoral over the allegorical. A cast of gods and shepherds celebrates the arrival of springtime with a contest to see who can extol the king’s virtues most beautifully, the winner receiving a crown of flowers.

A graceful orchestral introduction, establishing the pastoral mood, segued into the spring goddess Flora’s declamation of that season’s arrival and the rules of the contest, delightfully captured in Haimes’ pitch-perfect performance. Four characters then made their cases to win the crown, with fine contributions from sopranos Paulino and Ruth Escher and tenors Paul Elliott and Daniel Hutchings. Especially appealing were the alternating trios between women and men, the airtight ensemble singing flawless in intonation and blend. The divertissement concludes with Flora declaring all participants to be equally worthy of the crown and dividing its flowers among them, a judgment also well suited to the evening’s performances as a whole.

But what SFEMS does help make possible is the vibrant musical life in the interstices of the big local ensembles — the many chamber groups and individual projects that fly under the radar of the major presenters and the mainstream press.

It’s good to see SFEMS, as ever, active in presenting visiting ensembles (like the concerts by the Boston Shawm and Sackbut Ensemble in early November). But it’s characteristic of the organization that it has led off the current season with a concert set by a local group, and one that — in keeping with SFEMS’ dedication to building a Bay Area “early music ecology” — is made up of players that most devoted early music listeners here will know well from other contexts. Saturday’s concert by Voices of Music, at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, represented the SFEMS idea in action.

Voices of Music is an ensemble of flexible membership, though cofounders and continuo players David Tayler (archlute) and Hanneke van Proosdij (chamber organ) are constants. Saturday night’s “Evening With Bach” and the ensemble’s CD of the same title (available for purchase, download, or free listening here) share repertoire and personnel, but the overlap is nothing like complete.

On the CD as well as at the concert, you’d find certain Bach chestnuts (the “Air on the G String” and “Sheep May Safely Graze,” among others) and a clutch of the Bay Area’s best-known Baroque string players. But Saturday’s program ventured further afield on the instrumental side, including a violin-and-continuo sonata (BWV 1021) and a recorder/violin/cello arrangement of an organ trio sonata (BWV 529). Meanwhile, the music sung by Swedish soprano Susanne Rydén on the recording was taken in concert by Laura Heimes, a singer new to me.

Amazing Breath Control

Heimes, who seems to have built her career mainly on the East Coast, turns out to be more than the equal of the better-known Rydén. She has a clear yet rounded voice, full and mellow without being at all unwieldy. Her breath control, moreover, is astonishing; at the ends of one or two superhumanly long phrases she may have looked a trifle uncomfortable, but she didn’t sound it. At its best — in the first phrase of Cantata No. 82’s great aria “Schlummert ein,” for example — her singing was arrestingly lovely.

There were nits to pick. The chief one, for me, was some squirreliness of pitch. More often than I was comfortable with, she wasn’t quite in tune — often a hair flat, much less often slightly sharp. It wasn’t constant, but it was frequent enough that after a time I found myself bracing for the next “off” pitch.

The other difficulty was in Heimes’ enunciation. Consonants seemed occasionally to get swallowed in a peculiar way. In a program of (for me) familiar vocal Bach, recognizing the words wasn’t a problem. Indeed, it wasn’t until the unidentified encore (sung in English, of which I caught no more than the occasional word or two) that I was fully aware of how little intelligible the syllables were, so utterly beguiling was the basic sound.

Besides the concert-ending Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug (sung complete, in its less-familiar E-minor soprano-and-flute version), Heimes performed a number of shorter items on the first half. “Schafe können sicher weiden” (Sheep may safely graze), from the “Hunting Cantata,” BWV 208, found the versatile van Proosdij joining Louise Carslake for the obbligato recorder duo. The little song “Bist du bei mir” (If you are with me) is probably not Bach’s own music, but generations of music-lovers know it from its inclusion in the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach.

“Schlafe, mein Liebster” is from another secular cantata, BWV 213. It’s probably more familiar to most listeners as Mary’s lullaby in the second part of the Christmas Oratorio. In this earlier version, the seductively sweet aria is sung by the allegorical figure of Pleasure, trying to tempt an improbably stolid Hercules from the path of virtue. It is difficult to imagine the Hercules proof against Heimes — even though on Saturday her siren-song had raucous competition from actual, well, sirens, this being College Avenue on a Saturday night.

Suave, Sweet Playing

On the instrumental side, the performances had the combination of suavity and kick you would expect from the players involved. The “Air on the G String” (the Air from the Third Orchestral Suite, BWV 1068) was played with irresistible sweetness and easy motion by Kati Kyme and Carla Moore (violins) and Lisa Grodin (viola), with marvelously subtle and secure support from the continuo team of William Skeen on cello, Tayler, and van Proosdij.

The upper-part players embellished their lines, sparely and intelligently, but the standout of the performance was Skeen, who here and throughout the evening provided continuo cello playing of a quality you don’t often hear. It’s amazing how thoroughly fatal an insecure bass line can be even to an otherwise secure performance — and how solid an entire ensemble’s pitch can be when, as here, it has something absolutely reliable on which to build.

Where there were two violins, Kyme took the upper part, but it was Moore who played the two works with single violin parts. Her BWV 1021 was characteristically feisty, especially its last movement, and the organ/archlute/cello team backed her splendidly. The organ trio sonata, with van Proosdij as recorder player joining Moore and Skeen, couldn’t help still sounding like organ music, but it was nonetheless a hoot. More melodic-instrument trios seem to be availing themselves of the Bach organ trios these days, and with good reason: What’s not to like about an hour’s worth of Bach, already brilliantly arranged in three parts?

And the whole band came together for Ich habe genug, with Carslake playing transverse flute obbligato in the outer movements. Relative to the more familiar C-minor version, with oboe obbligato and bass soloist, this soprano version has some odd internal balances. No Baroque flute can take such a commanding role as against the strings as the oboe in the original version does. And Carslake’s playing, mellifluous but not sharply articulated, gave the strings an even greater portion of the stage.

All the same, the performance was beautifully nuanced, full of tender inflection and also (occasionally) sharp surprises, like the lute flourish leading from the end of the first aria to the recitative following, or the violently struck chord starting the recitative after “Schlummert ein.” (“Mein Gott!” is the text there; I bet a good part of the audience was thinking just that, in one language or another.)

The encore — something of a Scottish melodic cast and a haunting quality, with a simple, chordal accompaniment — was sung by Heimes with unforgettable poignancy and completely unintelligible words. It was a case of “Prima la musica,” though, given the choice between hearing her sing it again or finding out what the words were, I know which I’d pick.

On the program were Jean-Philippe Rameau’s one-act ballet Pygmalion and Thomas Arne’s masque, Comus. With McGegan presiding over the orchestra, the Philharmonia Chorale, and an outstanding trio of vocal soloists, the pairing proved a well-conceived, handsomely executed, and exuberant choice. Sunday evening’s performance at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church was the second of five; music lovers can catch one of the repeat performances, scheduled for Sept. 16 in Lafayette, Sept. 19 in San Francisco, and Sept. 20 in Palo Alto.

For many in the audience, Pygmalion, the program’s featured work, was probably the more familiar of the two titles. Ovid’s mythic tale (from Metamorphoses), of a sculptor who creates a beautiful statue and promptly falls in love with it, has inspired numerous retellings, George Bernard Shaw’s and Lerner and Loewe’s among them. It elicited a particularly unified response in Rameau and librettist Ballot de Sauvot.

The attractive Ouverture, often performed alone as a concert curtain-raiser, is only the tip of the iceberg. Sunday, McGegan conducted it briskly and with obvious affection, and his players responded with the kind of buoyant, dynamic playing that characterizes this orchestra’s finest work.

Heart’s Follies

Rameau begins the ballet proper at the moment just after the Statue is completed; Pygmalion, alone, takes time out to rail at Love in a long monologue (”Fatal Amour”). After a brief interruption from Cephise — who chides him for rejecting her, then stomps out — the magical moment arrives: Cupid waves his torch and, accompanied by a silvery flute duet (tenderly played by Stephen Schultz and Mindy Rosenfeld), brings the Statue to life. Love is declared, a dance lesson from the Graces is given, and pantomimes and general rejoicing ensue.

It’s all lovely, if, from a feminist point of view, a trifle one-sided: After the Statue sings her love for Pygmalion, she quickly reverts to her former mute state. It’s left to Pygmalion and the chorus to wrap things up, expounding (at length) on the joys of gratification.

Inequality aside, Sunday’s performance was thrilling. At McGegan’s urging, the orchestra played with tremendous verve and precision, and the vocal soloists were first-rate. In his Bay Area debut, Colin Ainsworth impressed as a Pygmalion of remarkable strength and agility. The Canadian tenor sang “Fatal Amour” with firm, ringing tone and ardent phrasing. His large voice was always audible, yet his soft singing was just as clear. In his concluding ariette, “Regne, Amour” (Reign, love), the juiciest line, “Epuise ton carquois” (Empty your quiver), was both softly floated and pointedly direct.

As the Statue, soprano Meredith Hall entered in a flame-red dress, struck a pose, and looked — well, statuesque. Her high, flexible voice is brilliant in color and texture, and she delivered her vows of love to Pygmalion with exquisite poise and melting beauty. Sophie Daneman’s bright-toned soprano enlivened both Cephise and Amour.

Apostrophizing Chastity

The evening’s first half was devoted to Comus. Arne’s 1738 masque, based on a poem by Milton, was the composer’s first major work for theater, and it hit the mark with unmistakable dramatic flair. This ostensible tribute to chastity dallies in the realm of sensual pleasure for what seems a very long time before making its points about virtue.

The title character, the son of the Greek god Dionysus, apprehends a Lady traveling in the forest, lures her to a cottage, binds her to a chair (no, really), and plies her with drink. Guided by a generous Spirit and the water nymph Sabrina, her brothers come to the rescue in the nick of time.

Contemporary audiences may find the story risible, but the score, comprising short songs and orchestral numbers, is a tantalizing blend of pastoral charm and florid expression (Handel was evidently so pleased by it that he was moved to write L’Allegro, il penseroso, ed il moderato soon thereafter). McGegan’s reading doubtless earned the work some new converts. Hall sang gloriously as the imperiled Lady, and Daneman contributed sweetly in several roles, including the lilting Euphrosyne. Ainsworth sounded positively Handelian in “Nor on beds of fading flowers.”

Between numbers, McGegan turned to the audience, assumed the role of Comus, and recited excerpts from Milton’s text with an amusing blend of incisive wit and lascivious glee. If the conducting thing doesn’t work out for him, a second career as a thespian awaits.

To answer that mouthful of a question, it helps to understand the genesis of Ordo Virtutum. According to producer J. Jeff Badger’s program notes, Hildegard composed the work ca.1150 for the dedication of the convent she had established at Rupertsburg, near Bingen, on the Rhine river in Germany. She never meant Ordo Virtutum for public performance. Instead, Badger asserts, she conceived it “as a vehicle for prayer and spiritual contemplation for her nuns.” While it is quite possible that it was presented in staged form within the sanctuary, since Hildegard notated dancing as one of the way in which The Virtues express themselves, it is doubtful that she conceived it in such a spiritually eclectic, Technicolor fashion.

Competing cosmologies

Hildegard’s allegorical masterpiece, which assigns different roles to different singers, is a classic Christian tale of God versus the Devil, good versus evil, and the journey from earthbound sin to the “Celestial Jerusalem.” Soon after the show begins, so to speak, the initially happy Soul, Anima, is tempted by the Devil to abandon her chastity for the pleasures of the world. The Virtues, led by their queen, Humility, provide various weapons to subdue “the ancient snake.” Singing such lines as “You were frightened by the highest judge because you, puffed up with pride, were submerged into hell,” the Virtues set about defeating the Devil. At the journey’s conclusion, some 75 minutes later, the source of all evil is ensnared, Anima is set free, and humility, chastity, and the other virtues proclaim their triumph. Together, everyone but the damned Devil praises the “omnipotent Father,” from whom the ”fountain flows in fiery love.”

Hinduism presents a very different worldview. Rather than positing a God in heaven and a Devil in hell, with sinful human beings caught in between, it posits embracing the god or universal life force within as the path to liberation. God is not an external entity or force; God resides within all living things. Only by fully merging with the God force within ourselves and every animate and inanimate thing can we achieve liberation.

While no Reader’s Digest summary can do justice to a complex belief system and way of life that embraces ideologies of reincarnation, karma, and spiritual liberation, it seems safe to say that Christianity and Hinduism offer different paths to God. Throw Celtic music, rooted in the pagan tradition of Goddess-based nature worship, into the mix, and you have a very confused spiritual cosmology that trivializes Hildegard’s faith.

Wonderful musicianship

On a purely musical level, San Francisco Renaissance Voices excelled. Although in consort, voices occasionally deviated one from the other, the overall level of achievement was high. Each woman was given solo responsibilities, and executed them beautifully. If I especially single out Katherine McKee’s rich-voiced and majestic Humility, Elisabeth Eliasson’s operatically communicative Chastity and Modesty, Marisa Lenhardt’s strength and beauty on high, and Meghan O’Connor’s heart-tugging voice of uncommon sympathy, it is not to slight the other singers, each of whom contributed substantially to the realization of Hildegard’s spiritual intent.

Equal praise goes to Jolly, who worked so hard to flesh out the writing with tasteful instrumentation and a few sections of added harmony. The extremely beautiful playing of Deepak Ram and Diana Rowan, which both began and ended the work, was also most gratifying. Thanks to such fine musicianship, it was often possible to put aside questions about the production and bask in the beauty of Hildegard’s transcendent creation.

Camp von Bingen

Nonetheless, extramusical elements sometimes got in the way. First and foremost, the conception sometimes asked too much of the participants. As hard as the women in the chorus tried — a few looked as though they were trying very hard — it was clear that not everyone was incarnated to dance before an audience.

Some elements crossed the line from curiosity to camp. It was bad enough when Tim Mooney, playing the Devil, undid the white sari of The Soul (Chloe Veltman) to reveal a sexy dame in a short, sparkling red dress. But when he proceeded to dress her in earrings and extremely high, ruby red platform shoes, it began to look as though someone had combed every thrift store in the city for an outfit the girls at the Tranny Shack would wear with pride.

Things got worse at the end, when Mooney’s Devil, sounding for all the world like an evil queen with a bad temper, was bound and gagged by the women. The coup de grace came when one of the Virtues covered him in a shiny scarlet sheet, rested one foot atop his body, and raised her hand in victory. Images from The Attack of the Killer Lesbians, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, and the Altered Barbie Show flooded the mind. Had Hildegard von Bingen been present, she no doubt would have fled Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church for the safety of the cloister.

Le Poème Harmonique

Le Poème Harmonique deployed 10 musicians for this intimate program: soprano Claire Lefilliâtre, tenors Serge Goubioud and Jan Van Elsacker, and bass Arnaud Marzorati; Olivia Centurioni on violin, Lucas Guimaraes on lirone and treble viol, Françoise Enock on violone, Jean-Luc Tamby on colascione (a plucked, fretted instrument) and Baroque guitar, Joël Grare on percussion, and the ensemble’s director, Vincent Dumestre, on theorbo and Baroque guitar.

Le Poème Harmonique observes both musical and theatrical practices of the 17th century, hence each piece on this program incorporated movements and gestures from the theater of that century, as well as music ornaments. In effect, we were seeing music as drama.

Further, the group performed on a stage initially lit only by candles and the indirect glow of lights on the instrumentalists’ music stands. The singers emerged from the gloom at the back of the stage to sing at center stage, flanked by a diagonal row of instrumentalists to each side.

This arrangement gave the audience some sense of what musical and theatrical performances must have been like before electric lights, and allowed for a fine theatrical coup: at the start of the fourth number, Manelli’s bergamasca titled La Barchetta passaggiera, a row of invisible candles stretching across the stage, mostly hidden from the audience’s sight in what looked like an elongated, low prompter’s box, burst into flame and added considerably to the available light.

The flickering light resembled flames reflected on water, a most appropriate image for the bergamasca, an entertaining and extremely funny account of a wild night on a boat. The four singers impersonated passengers from Lombardy, Tuscany, Germany, Naples, France, and Spain, who cook their national dishes for each other and drink a great deal of wine, while the ship’s cat merrily runs off with whatever food it can steal.

Lamenting Lost Loves

La Barchetta passaggiera provided the only comic moments on a program that otherwise consisted of romantic pining and laments for lost love. Monteverdi’s famous Lamento della Ninfa received a frustrating performance from Claire Lefilliâtre, though the male trio commenting on the nymph’s situation sang gorgeously. Lefilliâtre scooped into phrase beginnings far too often and started her solo at such a fevered emotional pitch that she had nowhere to go over the course of the lament. The piece would have worked better with more vocal poise and emotional restraint.

Contrariwise, Van Elsacker opened the program with a beautiful and utterly poised account of Ulysses’ awakening, from Act 1 of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno de Ulisse in patria. And Lefilliâtre’s intensely dramatic approach and dark-hued voice worked brilliantly in Benedetto Ferrari’s Chi non sa com’amor (He who knows not how Love), a long, passionate meditation on love’s sorrows, and in the composer’s Son ruinato (I am ruined).

The instrumental ensemble played discreetly throughout the evening, though with considerable flair. Violinist Centurioni came to the fore in Biaggio Marini’s Sonata terza (Third sonata), which program notes confusingly described as a work for three violins. Only one violinist was onstage, so perhaps the remaining violin parts were distributed among the plucked strings.

The balance of the 75-minute program was, by and large, charming and well-sung, though how charming you found the remaining musical numbers might depend on how you felt about the rather broad physical gestures used by the singers. The program closed with the jaunty Acceso mio core (My burning heart), proving that love’s sorrows can bring forth music in many moods.

Two encores followed, a repeat of Lamento della Ninfa no more satisfying than the first time through, and a cheery, unidentified piece played with all performers standing, the better to let them finally exit.

The Concord Ensemble

Embedded in the center of the opening section was a reading from Cervantes: a letter to Dulcinea from Don Quixote, that quintessentially deluded lover. From the beginning, the themes of the devoted lover and the gorgeous but indifferent object of his love were sounded. The singers were introduced in small groupings — a quartet, a trio, quintets, and finally the entire sextet. By the end of the section, the audience had gradually encountered the sounds and personalities of countertenor Paul Flight, alto/tenor/reader Pablo Corá, wide-ranging tenors N. Lincoln Hanks and Daniel Carberg, baritone Matthew Leese, and bass-baritone Scott Graff. The three inner voices, notably Corá’s, often took the lead musically, enhancing rather than diminishing the overall ensemble balance.

The Lovers section consisted entirely of songs by the immensely gifted composer Juan Vasquez. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the continuing theme of the ardent but often disappointed lover, the richness of Vasquez’ writing made this a felicitous grouping, beginning with a pervasive upward-third motif in De los álamos vengo, madre (I come from seeing the poplars and my girlfriend in Seville) and ending with a pianissimo farewell to Zagaleja de lo verde (Little shepherdess of the greens). A sudden outburst, Ay,ay,ay,ay, que ravio y muero (Oh that I rage and die), gave weight to the despairing words “duro y fuerte” (hard and strong) — words that later appeared in a complaint by Francisco Guerrero.

The wedding songs began with a reading referring to the Biblical wedding at Cana, and ended with a lively Chacona by Juan Arañés, describing in hilarious and highly secular detail an enormous cast of characters attending a wedding celebration. The singers had a lot of fun with the refrain, “A la vida, vidita bona, vida vámonos a Chacona” (Here’s to life, to the good life, my life, let’s dance the chaconne), ably abetted by a guest percussionist with castanets.

Other highlights: Vasquez’ Quien dize quel’ausencia (Absence makes the heart grow fonder), a trio eloquently sung by alto, tenor, and baritone; the same composer’s two settings of Lágrimas de mi consuelo (Tears of my consolation), especially the first one, characterized by extraordinary episodes of dissonance and resolution; and another reading by Pablo Corá from Don Quixote: “De ese modo, no es cordura querer curar la pasión, cuando los remedios son: muerte, mudanza y locura” (It makes no sense to seek a cure for passion, when the only remedies are death, inconstancy, and madness).

Four different composers set the same poem: Recuerde el alma dormida. The last setting, by Juan Navarro, ended the concert: “Remember the sleeping soul … How does death arrive? Very quietly.”

Daniel Zuluaga’s program notes were helpful in providing the historical context for this repertoire, both political and musical. (Zuluaga’s name will be familiar to those who heard him playing theorbo with L’estro Harmonico on Friday.)

Enter a Renaissance Band

The Concord Ensemble returned to Hertz Hall Friday night for a concert with the Renaissance band Piffaro. And lo and behold, there was the castanet player from Wednesday, Tom Zajac, playing just about everything except castanets. In fact, the six members of Piffaro (expanded to seven by a guest) play among them five shawms, two sackbuts, five recorders, three bagpipes, two dulcians, a variety of percussion instruments, lute, guitar, harp, pipe, and tabor, with a little singing thrown in.

Sackbuts and shawms started the program, which reached back into the 15th century, focusing on the Medici family in Florence. The singers stood behind the players, then came forward to sing with lute and harp accompaniment. This movement back and forth continued for several more pieces, with the singers emerging in various combinations and retreating as the instruments took over.

Finally all the singers alternated with all the players in a great semicircle across the stage, for the performance of Villana che sa tu far? (Shepherdess, what can you do?). The composer was anonymous, as are many in this early repertoire, and the decidedly secular dialog was just getting interesting when the Italian words for “lift your legs” slid into Latin — “Hear our prayer” — followed by the Kyrie and Christe of the Mass, producing a striking example of the blurring of the lines between sacred and secular in music of this period.

Heinrich Isaac was hired by the Medici in 1485 and stayed in Florence until his death in 1512. His lament on the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici was beautifully sung by the Concord Ensemble: “Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?” (Who will give water to my head? Who will give to my eyes a fountain of tears?). Two Dominican songs began with unison chanting: Torna, torna (Turn back … to Jesus), which developed into part singing and was accompanied by several instruments; and Allegro canto (Joyful I sing … of Saint Dominic), in which the chant leads to highly florid solo singing. Carro della morte (Procession of the dead), beginning and ending with “Dolor, pianto e penitenza” (Sorrow, tears, and penitence), was accompanied by low instruments.

Throughout the concert, the singers sometimes performed a cappella but mostly were paired with various instruments: the mellow sackbuts; the reedy shawms; the quiet plucked harp, lute, or guitar; the bracing bagpipes. The instrumental pieces were orchestrated imaginatively: for example, five recorders for a piece by Arcadelt; two bagpipes, guitar, and tambourine for the anonymous La giloxia; shawms and sackbuts for Isaac’s Palle, palle.

The large, enthusiastic audience craved an encore, and the entire company of players and singers obliged with a reprise of Torna, torna.

Whether early or late, Western or non-Western, popular or not, there is no known piece of music that rivals Striggio’s achievement in transnational political import or sheer polyphonic massiveness. The work has been legendary since its first performances in 1567, while it has remained a crucial footnote in music history as the inspiration for Tallis’ Spem in alium. Even without a surviving score, we could vaguely imagine the impact this work must have had on its first audiences. In no other documented instance has a composer written a work in 40-part polyphony, only to bowl the audience over with a 60-part finale.

Now that a copy of the score has been brought to light and painstakingly transcribed, it was with tremendous anticipation that we awaited its North American premiere under Moroney’s baton as part of Cal Performances’ Berkeley Festival and Exhibition on Sunday at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley.

Not only was the concert program itself eagerly awaited, but also the opportunity arose to witness a rare collaboration among five distinguished Bay Area vocal ensembles, seldom if ever seen onstage together. Striggio’s Mass calls for a division of its 60 parts into five distinct choirs. To further accentuate each choir’s individual identity, Moroney assigned each choir to one ensemble apiece. This patchwork assemblage reflects Renaissance practices, where in certain cities it would have been necessary to draw on the musicians from multiple civic and sacred institutions to perform a work such as this, being of the highest ceremonial splendor.

Magnificat

Thus Moroney organized members of Magnificat, Philharmonia Chorale, American Bach Soloists, Schola Cantorum San Francisco, and UC Berkeley’s Perfect Fifth in a semicircle around the Bassus ad organum instrumentalists, with himself in the center and His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts (yes, true name) standing in the back.

American Bach Soloists

With so many local groups performing Renaissance repertory in proximate isolation, this concert also gave listeners a chance to compare these ensembles side-by-side. The first choir was made up of members of Magnificat who, as the most featured choir in Striggio’s work, also shone most brightly. This may have been a disadvantage for the Philharmonia Chorale singers beside them. The American Bach Soloists, strengthened with brass instruments, and Schola Cantorum San Francisco were both relatively strong, but Philharmonia Chorale faded somewhat precipitously into the background.

Schola Cantorum

Perfect Fifth, a student ensemble specializing in medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary music, may have had the least professional experience, but they were hardly the weakest group onstage. Rather, the young singers’ flexibility and visible excitement served to invigorate the overall performance, while reflecting the variety in age and experience intrinsic to most early-modern choirs.

The rarity of the event was such that whatever the audience may have expected was sure to be surpassed. We are accustomed to a certain visual uniformity to a choir onstage, but to see Striggio’s Mass performed was to witness the opposite, as each singer both visually and aurally stood separate from those around him or her. The result was a wealth of animated movements onstage as each responded to his or her individualized score.

It is hard to convey how impressive this looked in the live performance. When people listen to traditional polyphony, the emergence of and then engulfment in individual lines often brings order to their listening experience, but such absorption is impossible in a work like this. As soon as you have picked out one individual strand, you have lost it, and all that remains is an irresolvable skein of lines. Only in the final Agnus Dei was there clarity to the structure on a line-by-line basis, as the singers entered one after the other, but even this compositional conceit quickly was lost, once voice number seven or eight made his or her entry.

Antiphonal exchanges among the choirs, and textural contrasts in the number of simultaneous choirs, both worked to magical effect. Perhaps clear in the score or at many moments during the performance, even these distinctions often evaporated in the maelstrom of activity. As it was surely meant to do, Striggio’s Mass overwhelmed the senses, both visually and sonically.

Amazing Brass Artistry

His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts, flown in from the United Kingdom, brought further magnificence to the overall sound while doubling the third of the five choirs. This group demonstrated an astonishing skill and artistry that elevated them far beyond similar brass ensembles. Along with the keyboard players, they opened the program with five early Baroque instrumental pieces in the Venetian style by Giovanni Battista Grillo, Aurelio Bonelli, and Giovanni Gabrieli.

His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts

A particular highlight was Grillo’s Canzon in ecco, during which half the ensemble stood facing the back wall in the balcony behind the audience, echoing the cadences of the group onstage. Meanwhile, it was difficult not to stare mouth agape at Wim Becu as he worked an extraordinarily rare contrabass sackbut a few feet taller than the performer himself.

The instrumental works made an excellent prelude to the featured work on the program. They hinted at the variety of antiphonal effects and polyphonic divisions exploited by early-modern Italian composers who wrote for large ensembles, and suggested the ways that architectural space can contribute spectacularly to live performance.

To coordinate six-plus ensembles accustomed to their own conductors provided obvious challenges to Moroney on the podium. (It would also have been nice to see a few more female instrumentalists alongside the singers.) It was to the benefit of us all that Davitt Moroney met this challenge as well as he did, leaving us to wonder when he will present his marvelous discovery to the public once again.

On the other hand, as the forces involved in that premiere might suggest, the reason the Berkeley Festival looks to a Bay Area early music aficionado merely like a mild upward blip in early music activity every other year is that the ambient level around here is so high. Small wonder that the “fringe” occasionally threatens to dwarf the woven part of the carpet.

Artists’ Vocal Ensemble

Photo by H. Tran

So what would in most other places have been a main event, featuring mostly imported personnel, was at the Festival a side-production by a local ensemble. And not one of the Bay Area’s larger, more institutionalized early Music groups, either, but the Artists’ Vocal Ensemble (AVE), a small professional choir only four years old. In collaboration with The Whole Noyse (the Bay Area’s go-to Monteverdi Vespers band for at least 20 years — and of how many other locales could you even make such a statement of an ensemble without its being absolute gibberish?), AVE and its music director, keyboardist Jonathan Dimmock, gave a performance of Monteverdi’s enduringly amazing collection at Berkeley’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church that would have rated advance headlines just about anywhere else.

Every so often in music history you come across a work that was obviously meant as a too-blatant-to-be-missed demonstration of the composer’s skill. The 1610 Vespers is maybe the most astonishing of them all. Dimmock’s program note describes the piece as a sort of job application to the Pope, which is true enough. But what could Paul V — could anyone? — have made of the thing?

It’s all in there: fantastic, not to say excessive, mastery of counterpoint; a confident, not to say cocky, delight in wordplay; ostentatious up-to-date-ness in everything from the vocal styles required to the extravagant instrumental forces demanded — coupled with that most over-the-top nod to tradition, Monteverdi’s basing the whole thing (motets apart) on chant canti fermi. Under each of the massive choral settings of the Vespers Psalms runs the bare traditional recitation formula for a psalm. Around the little formula for the litany “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis” (Blessed Mary, pray for us), Monteverdi weaves a vast, complex instrumental canzona.

With 15 singers, AVE is certainly large enough to cover all the parts — the largest number of independent lines in the work is 10, in the Nisi Dominus. And the florid and intricate writing, even in the big Psalm settings, makes its own eloquent case for one- (or at most two-) on-a-part performance. That said, it remains a tall order for any ensemble.

Uncommon Skill

The AVE singers threw themselves eagerly into the task, and the results were a tribute to their skill and their enthusiasm alike. Intonation and balance were remarkably good, with no obvious weak spots in the texture. (If the tenor line seemed strikingly strong and clear on occasion, it wasn’t that the other parts were lacking; it’s just that AVE’s four tenors pack an unusually formidable punch.)

There were signs, to be sure, of hasty preparation. With strong but few singers spread across many parts, unsurprisingly the most obvious errors were wrong entrances. Keeping your eye on the score and the beat in such convoluted stuff takes an unholy level of sustained concentration.

Dimmock didn’t make matters easy on his sopranos, either, by having them face the icon of the Blessed Virgin on the rear wall of the church for the “Sonata sopra ‘Sancta Maria.’” It was a lovely conceit, but a major logistical risk, because in this mother of all rest-counting nightmares, the singers all had their backs to the conductor. Tonia d’Amelio, glancing over her shoulder and bobbing at the knees, did her best to convey the beat to the other three sopranos, but even so there were some false steps.

Quite apart from these occasional glitches, though, there were problems of pacing and phrasing in the big choruses. The work is so full of detail — all of it interesting, all enticing the individual singer to dwell on it lovingly — that keeping larger-scale goals in sight is one hell of a job. One of those unfulfilling, irritating jobs, too, in which your primary role is to cut off other people’s effusions in the name of economy, or something almost equally unromantic.

AVE didn’t exactly dawdle over the music; indeed, the basic tempos were briskish, sometimes almost excessively so (I’m thinking here of the opening of the “Ave maris stella”). But once a movement was in swing, it tended to lose direction. The shaping seemed to be primarily on the local level, so that long stretches of music had no trajectory of their own, and the effect was one of lost forward momentum even if the actual tempo didn’t bog down that much.

Also, phrases often reached their dynamic peak at the resolution of the cadence, rather than just before. Some of that I’m inclined to attribute to the way well-tuned triads, like AVE’s, resonate; even so, there was a weird sense of tensing, rather than relaxing, into cadences.

Line Emerges Into the Light

In smaller, self-contained sections, it must be said, AVE’s singers demonstrated phenomenal control and shaping of phrases. For me the highlight of the entire performance was the “Et misericordia” of the Magnificat, a dialogue between three lower and three upper voices that was, here, an extraordinary emergence of line out of the gritty depths and into the light.

(The scholarly consensus these days is that two movements of the Vespers, including the Magnificat, were meant to be performed at much lower than written pitch. The transposition takes the glittery edge off the high instrumental parts in the Magnificat, but it also makes the vocal lines more reasonable — except in this one spot, where the low voices really are crawling around in the sepulchral dark. In AVE’s performance, the guttural depths sounded extreme, but also right; for the first time, I’d found something in the low-pitch version that actually compensated for the loss of the marvelous, if spurious, high violin and cornetto parts.)

The solo singing varied from good to exceptional. Soprano Tonia d’Amelio was a standout, tempering her earthy edge to Rita Lilly’s more delicate voice in the two-soprano “Pulchra es,” and singing in eerily perfect thirds with alto Clifton Massey in the Magnificat’s “Esurientes.” Fred Jodry was the sonorous bass soloist in the Magnificat’s “Quia respexit,” and I think was responsible as well for the clarionlike invocation “Deus in adjutorium” at the opening of the work.

Among the tenors, Neal Rogers’ rather lumpy “Nigra sum” was disappointing, but Monteverdi’s bravura three-tenor riff on the Trinity, “Duo seraphim,” was magnificent, with Ed Betts and Jeff Barnett joining Rogers in the daunting vocal roulades. Barnett, who had the main part in the great tenor/echo dialogue of “Audi coelum,” covered the part’s ridiculously wide range with only slight signs of strain; Betts (the delicate “echo” in “Audi coelum”) came into his own in the Magnificat’s “Gloria Patri,” where Rogers was his echo.

The few stretches of plainchant were beautifully and simply sung, men taking one antiphon and women the next one. I am not sure how Dimmock picked the antiphons. It can’t have been purely by matching mode and final to the music to come, because there were some jarring transitions, particularly the one from the chant “In odorem” to the psalm “Laetatus sum.”

On the instrumental side, things were in the capable hands of Whole Noyse’s omnicompetent winds (playing cornetti and trombones most of the time, though in the Magnificat they switched nimbly to recorders) and a few string players well known to Bay Area audiences. (Herb Myers, who played recorder, flute, and curtal — sort of an early bassoon — with the other Whole Noyse folks, doubled on viola with the string band.) With the wind forces on one side of the space and the strings on the other, coordination was sometimes a problem, especially when one or more widely spaced singers had to be factored into the mix.

Thiessen’s sound was clear and sweet, full of heart-stopping high D’s (he didn’t miss one all night) and agile passagework. He is our nation’s only full-time professional playing the natural trumpet, so the chance to hear and see him up close in a small hall is not to be missed. But in this concert, he was a member of the ensemble rather than a dominating solo presence. For example, in a concerto by Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758), there was a long passage for trumpet and oboe in parallel thirds, in which they blended so well that it became difficult to tell which voice was which.

Thiessen performed in two other works, a solo concerto by Giuseppe Torelli (1658-1709) and a seldom-played 1733 version of Handel’s Water Music, which included two movements that were not part of the familiar version of the suite usually played today. Thiessen plays a copy of a 1748 German instrument. Unlike violins, 18th-century brass instruments deteriorate with frequent playing (as the humidity interacts with impurities in the brass) and can be toxic to the player’s health.

The originals had serious design limitations as well: They could play the notes of the tonic chord (doh-mi-sol) well enough, one more note (re) only slightly out of tune, two more notes (fa and la) very much out of tune, and the other notes not at all. How, then, did Handel and his trumpeters deal with the out-of-tune notes? They grinned and bore it, minimizing the use of the false notes and confining them to short notes in rapid, scalar passages.

Best of Both Worlds

What we hear today, whenever we hear a natural trumpet, is a miracle of the modern instrument-maker’s art: notes made possible by nodal vents. By opening a small hole at an appropriate point (node), the tubing is shortened, and the notes from a different chord are produced. The player covers the holes with his fingers, and, like an oboist, opens them when their notes are needed. Thus, today’s natural trumpet is the best of both worlds. Its small bell and the hand-hammered tubing produce a sound that can blend with a chamber ensemble, while the nodal vents give it the perfect intonation to which we are accustomed.

Thiessen’s fingers were flying throughout the program, and the result was superb. But what a pity it is that this expedient, which was well within the ambit of 18th-century technology, was not discovered until the 1950s.

The other pieces on the program (which alternated with the trumpet works to keep us from getting tired of the key of D, and to give Thiessen a rest from high-register clarino playing) were similarly instructive regarding the exigencies of period instruments. In Telemann’s violin concerto called “The Frogs,” soloist Carla Moore played the bariolage effects (the same note played on both open and stopped strings to imitate the sound of frogs) with verve and a sense of humor, making the unpromising principal theme (a single note) into an aesthetic challenge met and mastered.

The Sixth “Brandenburg” Concerto treated the audience, which is used to ABS’ superior ensemble skills, the result of many years of playing together, to the remarkable sight of cellist Joanna Blendulf determinedly and correctly bowing everything exactly backward from the two gamba players beside her.

Violists Katherine Kyme and Aaron Westman shone through the one-to-a-part ensemble. The delicate accompaniment of the gambas allowed them to sing, instead of merely struggling to be heard. This piece can often sound muddy, due to the low tessitura (the violas are the highest voices). A slightly slower-than-usual tempo in the contrapuntal sections helped the audience to hear the intricate passagework clearly.

The program ended with a second, less famous, piece of “water music” — that of Telemann, written for the seaport city of Hamburg in 1723. ABS Music Director Jeffrey Thomas’ short introductory comments pointed out the work’s elements of tone painting, using slow rising scales and long, sustained notes in the oboes to represent the ocean. Later, the bass instruments contributed their share to the nautical effect with fast runs, rhythmic leaps, and lusty off-beats to depict the dances of die lustigen Bots Leute (the merry mariners). It is a piece that deserves to be heard more often.