ClevelandClassical
CC&CNewberryRev
Review
Newberry Consort at Harkness: CWRU's Chapel, Court and Countryside Series (September 19)
by Nicholas Jones
"Hung be the heavens with black!" begins what may have been Shakespeare's first play. Sunday afternoon, the windows of CWRU's Harkness Chapel were hung with black, not in mourning, but to darken the stage for the Newberry Consort's presentation of "An early movie with early music." The Chicago-based ensemble presented vocal and instrumental music from Elizabethan and Jacobean times to accompany the screening of the 1912 silent movie, "The Loves of Queen Elizabeth," starring the grande dame of Paris theater, Sarah Bernhardt. Shakespeare, by the way, makes an appearance in the movie.To begin with the music: as always, the CWRU series Chapel, Court, & Countryside brought us early music of exceptional quality. The four viol players of the Newberry, playing in various combinations with Renaissance violinist (and Newberry Consort director) David Douglass, gave us renditions of wordless songs, dances, and laments from Dowland, Holborne, Byrd, Campion, and others, that were in themselves as emotionally charged as any Shakespeare soliloquy. Joined for vocal numbers by the expressive soprano Ellen Hargis, they reminded us that you don't need a vast range of dynamics or orchestral color to evoke powerful feelings. In their hands, the complicated polyphonies of consort music were sharply and sensitively articulated, by turns delicately melancholy and darkly complicated. Those pieces that Hargis sang – and we wanted more – such as the haunting Dowland tune, Flow my tears, were as compelling as any operatic aria.
In the film, Bernhardt – at the age of 68 – plays the aging Elizabeth of England, infatuated with the dashing young Earl of Essex. Circumstances too complicated to unravel here lead her tragically to sign his death warrant for treason (suffice it to say that the historical motives of his botched expedition against the Irish and his equally botched coup against the queen are quite erased in this film, which concentrates on competing amours). At the crisis of the film, the queen visits the decapitated body of her favorite, and kisses his head full on the lips. Only a few years earlier, in the notorious Oscar Wilde/Richard Strauss opera, the lascivious Salome had performed just such a "perversity", as controversial a moment as the more well-known dance of the seven veils. Surely this was not unknown to the passionate and theatrically daring Bernhardt!
The Newberry's daring concept was to accompany this visual fin-de-siècle decadence with elegant, precise, and gripping Elizabethan music – galliards, laments, allemandes, even some anonymous folksongs
evocatively arranged by Douglass (who also delivered a cogent and very helpful introduction to the film). The music for the most part stayed in the background, supporting the moods of the film, condoling, lamenting, romancing, or affrighting as the movie called for. Douglass skillfully matched the film's rhythms – a particularly successful arrangement of the supposed Anne Boleyn poem, O Death rock me asleep, for example, accompanied the ominous entry of Essex to the Tower of London – where, of course, Boleyn had met her tragic fate. Watching the 1912 film with the music of the 1600s was an exercise in historical stretch. Here was music that these accomplished performers have studied deeply and perform with as much historical commitment as our distance from it and the limits of our knowledge will permit. On the other hand, there was this film, perhaps in its own time motivated by as deep a commitment to historical principles as we give to our pursuit of early music today, but in our eyes inevitably falling short. We watched the contortions and posturings of this film, a hundred years after its creation, and found them archaeologically interesting but emotionally and historically lacking. At the crisis points, the audience laughed. We should note that one might set about any such historicizing with trepidation. If we laugh at Bernhardt's grande-dame queening, there is some future generation who will laugh at what we propose about historical performance, despite our best scholarship, musicality, and sincerity. And yet, what can we do but do our best – as the Newberry certainly does?
Before the performance, presenter and CWRU faculty member Beverly Simmons warmly welcomed the audience. In her welcome, though, she dropped something of a bomb, announcing that this was to be the last season of Chapel, Court, & Countryside. This series has for some 25 years brought the best early music to Cleveland. It may be shutting down because Simmons (and co-presenter Ross Duffin) need a well-deserved break. But if the closure is for lack of financial support, I hope supporters – individual and institutional alike – will reconsider the importance of presenting such first-class, thought-provoking, and memorable musical experiences.
ClevelandClassical
