The Coal-Seller's Other Wares

There are times when it seems to me that you could drop a pail anywhere in the 17th century and find when you brought it back up that it contained enough first-rate (and, for the most part, completely unfamiliar) music for a season's worth of concerts. Needless to say, it's not quite so simple as that. Still, a couple of decades' worth of trolling those waters by Bay Area early music ensembles seems scarcely to have made a dent in the supply. There are yet more fish in that sea than ever came out of it. Musica Pacifica spends most of its time a little further on in the repertory (Bach, Vivaldi, Marais). Saturday night's program at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley (under the auspices of the San Francisco Early Music Society), though, saw the chamber ensemble focusing on late-17th-century London. The playing, like the music, was strong, striking, and unpredictable.

The ensemble's program took its bearings from the concerts arranged and promoted in that era and place by Thomas Britton, who was by day a seller of "small-coal" (charcoal) and by night likely the city's first public concert-giving entrepreneur. Britton's rich offerings seem to have persuaded even the city's elite to brave the perilous streets and the dubious staircase that led to his upstairs rooms in Clerkenwell, and, thanks to accounts of the music sold at the breaking up of his estate, we have a fair idea of what they heard. Any excuse will do, so far as I'm concerned, to assemble a program of English chamber music of the mid to late 17th century. But Britton's story would be fascinating even if the music were less good. And the Britton hook additionally allowed Musica Pacifica to work in a fair pile of Italian music from the early part of the century. (Britton had stocked up on such pieces.) Henry Purcell was, understandably, the anchor of the program: His prelude for three treble instruments from King Arthur and the harmonically intense G-minor Pavan opened the first half, and a suite from the incidental music to Diocletian the second, with the magnificent Three Parts on a Ground originally to close. But in the interstices came much less familiar pieces, some English, some Italian. I've dipped into this repertoire many times before, so I really had no excuse for being staggered again by the sheer, profligate imagination of it. But there it is: You could wander endlessly around amid mid-17th-century scores, gleaning only the real gems, and end up with music enough for a lifetime's concertizing. They were written, for the most part, by people whose names figure as minor index items in the bigger music-history texts. Biagio Marini and Tarquinio Merula, thanks to the early-music-recording explosion of the least couple of decades, aren't complete unknowns any more. One of the Marini dances on this program I'd heard before, while Merula's Ciaccona is as nearly a "standard" as any 17th-century instrumental piece short of the Pachelbel Canon can be. On the other hand, I'd never before run into the trio sonata ("L'Eroica") by Andrea Falconiero (c. 1585-1656), which rounded out the first half. At least, I thought I hadn't, until the Musica Pacifica players got to the sonata's own central Ciaccona, with its irresistible hemiolas and its casual, genial wandering from key to key. That section I thought I had heard before, and when I went home I found it, on a Jordi Savall CD that skips the rest of the piece.

New Prospects of the Past

Then there were a handful of dance pieces by Maurizio Cazzatti, and a remarkable three-treble sonata by Giovanni Battista Buonamente, all new to me. On the English side, meanwhile, were pieces by Matthew Locke and John Jenkins, together with a big suite for three trebles by Thomas Baltzar that, again, I'd never yet encountered. A program like this makes you realize how wide the 17th century is. The playing was fantastic, even by Musica Pacifica's standards. Much credit has to go to the guest players; it's one thing to play up to the host ensemble's level, quite another to mesh with it so deftly as to make everyone sound yet better, which is what happened here. Violinist Robert Mealy, in fact, is the first player I've heard who genuinely sounds at home dueting with Elizabeth Blumenstock. The two of them matched tone, gesture, and subtle rhythmic maneuvers with casual but devastating confidence. I don't know quite how Mealy got into the skin of Blumenstock's famously quirky articulation, but get there he did. No doubt it helps that he's as alert a cuer, and a taker of cues, as anyone I've ever seen. He seemed as attentive to the rest of the players as though he were conducting them — as indeed he sometimes seemed to be. Percussionist Peter Maund, the other guest, played mainly tambourine (deftly and almost shyly most of the time), with occasional recourse to bigger frame drums. On the few occasions he let loose (I'm thinking especially of Jack's Maggott, the last number of the program's concluding set of English dance tunes), his nonchalant virtuosity was a wonder to behold. In the main, though, he used a light touch; you felt an extra urge to move with the music without always realizing at first where it was coming from. The many pieces with two treble parts were judiciously split up, usually with recorder-player Judith Linsenberg partnering one or the other of the violinists, but occasionally with two violins. The several three-treble pieces, of course, demanded all three players, and putting the recorder in the middle of what was originally (mostly) violin-ensemble music made for some unexpected effects. Linsenberg is a canny blender, though. In the opening Purcell pieces, playing what I think was a tenor recorder, she insinuated herself into the string texture with great ease. Later in the program she took up smaller and more brilliant instruments, dancing on top of the texture. In everything, the Musica Pacifica continuo team (Charles Sherman on harpsichord, David Morris principally on gamba in the English music and cello in the Italian) caught, reflected, and amplified their colleagues' gestures. (The sparks flew in the other direction, too; it would be hard not to groove to a Ciaccona the way Morris plays one.) The playing throughout was on par with the music, which is saying something. This was rich stuff indeed — rich in fantasy, and rich in variety too. The unfettered exuberance of some of the dance music (the second "Almaine" of the Baltzar suite, like Merula's Ballo detto Pollicio, erupted into a giddy mayhem of violin scales) was matched by moments of perfect and almost frightening serenity. The "Ayre" from the Locke suite — poised, pensive, and phrased with an attention to harmonic motion that would have seemed hopelessly finicky if it had made a single misstep — was extraordinary. I've heard that piece before, too, but not like that.

The British Isles Have It

The program was rearranged at the last moment so as to put a suite of English (and Scotch, and Irish) tunes, in the ensemble's own arrangements for the most part, after Purcell's Three Parts on a Ground rather than before. I can understand wanting to end with the dances. They were fresh, varied, fun, and scored so as to give everyone solo breaks, from Blumenstock's "Irish Lamentation" (plaintively inflected, fiddle-wise, a la "Ashokan Farewell," and accompanied at the beginning by pizzicato gamba) to Morris' gutsy Scottish snaps in "Scotch Cap," to Linsenberg's darting soprano recorder in the aforementioned "Jack's Maggott." But the Purcell Three Parts crowned the evening for me. For those who don't know the piece, it's one of a kind: a fantastic, not to say grotesque, layering of parts over a ground bass, wickedly contrived and yet giving the impression of completely lawless exuberance. This is the part-writing that your counterpoint teacher warned you about. (Pachelbel for stoners?) But man, is it ever fun. And in Musica Pacifica's hands, it rocked. The encore was Nicola Matteis' Ground After the Scotch Humour, which I think Musica Pacifica managed to make include everyone by playing all its various counterpoints at the same time. (If I'm remembering the piece correctly, there's a tune and then two subsequent lines that work in combination with it; I don't think I've heard all three at once before, but it works.)