Review
Report from the Boston Early Music Festival, June 13-18, 2011

by Nicholas Jones

Since 1980, the Boston Early Music Festival has attracted top performers and avid, knowledgeable listeners. Now a biennial event, the week-long gathering is a buzz of medieval, renaissance, and baroque excitement, and marks Boston indelibly as the capital of early music in the United States. I went to three musical events, all excellent and markedly different from each other. The range of these events—a mere sampling of the dozens of offerings packing the week—characterizes the bold eclecticism of the early music movement today.

To begin with the smallest (in terms only of the number of performers), Thursday afternoon's concert at NEC's Jordan Hall—a packed house—featured the great Catalonian gamba player and impresario Jordi Savall (above) in a program titled "The Celtic Viol." Accompanied gracefully and lightly by Paul O'Dette on cittern and lute and Shane Shanahan on bodhrán, Savall alternated playing the lyra viol (a variant of the bass gamba) and treble viol. The music was largely by that famous early music composer "Anonymous," or in this case, "Traditional": Savall had created five sets of dance tunes, all drawn from the British folk tradition. The titles were as intriguing as Savall's playing was riveting: "The Pigges of Rumsey," "Crabs in the skillet," "The Gander in the pratie [potato] hole," and the like. Savall's playing took these unadorned melodies and expanded them into a sequence of full musical experiences. Especially moving were a number of laments interspersed among the dance tunes, including one apparently played by the composer on the occasion of his execution.

It was largely Savall's program: the viol, whether bass or treble, laid out the tune, created the bass lines, added counterpoint, varied the treatment, and supplied the rhythms. The variations, divisions, ornaments, shifts of register, and changes of mood at times evoked the power and complexity of the Bach cello suites. Though based on dance music, these, like Bach's suites, were scarcely danceable: they were the product of a modern master finding the meaning of old tunes for our time. 

On Wednesday, the Boston Camerata presented a program of largely 14th-century music, also at Jordan Hall. In line with the festival's theme of "Metamorphosis," they called the program "The Morphing Beast" — a title perhaps fitting Hogwarts better than Jordan Hall. Opening the concert were Camerata artistic director and singer Anne Azéma and Shira Kammen on vielle and harp in a series of songs about animals and lovers. With Azéma's clear and focused voice and Kammen's highly expressive playing, these strange fantasies (about "the four-legged Narcissus," the "Monosceros" and the "Unicorne") became musical and cultural treasures as valued for their loveliness as their strangeness.

Bringing medieval music to modern ears has been the work of the Camerata for years, and the second and larger section of their BEMF program revived one such project, the performing of the 14th-century manuscript poem/oratorio "Le Roman de Fauvel." Almost twenty years ago, artistic director emeritus and founder Joel Cohen took on the musical and performance challenges of this strange beast-fable about a horse, Fauvel, who briefly leaves the stable to become the master of a court, woos the fickle lady Fortune (predictably, without success), has a roll in the hay with a temptress named Vain Glory, and—as in all scam fables— ends up in the gutter. Cohen has translated parts of the poem into lively English couplets, which he used to keep the story going (a sample from Fauvel's glory-days: "The rich, the poor, the thin, the plump, / All wipe away at Fauvel's rump"). The musical selections—also part of this amazing manuscript—were brilliantly performed by the multi-talented members of the Camerata, who brought out the drama, rhythmic intricacy, and tonal splendor of this highly sophisticated music. Azéma sang the role of Fortune, Michael Collver spectacularly represented Fauvel (and played the cornetto at times), Michael Barrett created a winsome Vain Glory, Steven Lundahl added voice, sackbut, slide trumpet, and recorder, and Kammen filled in with vielle and harp. Cohen narrated, sang, and played the lute. The presentation was visually enhanced with projections of illuminations from the manuscript, many of which the performers mimicked to good effect.

The grandest production of the festival was the fully-staged production of the baroque opera Niobe, Queen of Thebes at Emerson College's Cutler Majestic Theater. Since Jeannette Sorrell has written about this in this issue of ClevelandClassical, I won't go into detail except to say that the performance was at once a window into what such an opera must have looked and sounded like at the time, and at the same time a thoroughly modern experience of ambition, betrayal, self-delusion and tragic irony. As Sorrell noted, the singing of countertenor Phillipe Jaroussky—heard last year in Cleveland at CIM singing French art songs—held the emotional, musical, and moral core of this complex and beautiful opera.

I did not have time, with other commitments in Boston this week, to get to the many fringe events, including performances by CWRU early music students and Oberlin's Historical Performance group among many others. It was a treat, though, to spend time in the festival's exhibition hall, watching these young performers mingling with the many instrument makers who had brought flutes, harps, violins, harpsichords and more to sell.  Many of these young performers, of course, have already invested in modern instruments, and are now discovering the rewards of early music performance: hopefully, with events like BEMF (and groups like Apollo's Fire and Les Delices—founder Debra Nagy was at the festival as well) they will find ways to buy these instruments and make a living with them.

One quibble with this festival: the program notes and artist bios for all the concerts are packaged together in one "yearbook," available for $11. If you don't buy it, or don't want to lug it around downtown Boston, or forget to bring it with you, all you get is a poorly printed and uninformative half sheet of paper. At the festival's prices, it's not too much to expect a real concert program.

Nicholas Jones is professor of English at Oberlin College and an avid amateur musician.

Published on clevelandclassical.com June 21, 2011
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