Once a year or so, it's well to remember what we really owe the
San Francisco Early Music Society. These aren't the early days of the early music movement, when “mainstream” presenters were leery of this faddish, old-instruments business, and it took the grassroots efforts of devotees to organize concerts by top-flight visiting “early musicians.” And the likes of Philharmonia Baroque, Chanticleer, Magnificat, and the American Bach Soloists are familiar institutions in their own right.
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.