Love abounds at Boston Early Music Festival
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As one example is the Tallis Scholars, a United Kingdom-based vocal ensemble directed by the seemingly tireless Peter Phillips since 1973. The group tends to hang onto its singers for the long haul. According to the festival's souvenir program book, which this year weighs 2 pounds, 5 ounces, alto Caroline Taylor logged her 2,000th performance with the group in Boston this past winter during their customary annual Christmastime visit. The Scholars go deep, not wide; unaccompanied sacred music from the Renaissance is their bread and butter, and their Sistine Chapel-inspired program on Wednesday fell comfortably into that niche.
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Emmanuel Church was the perfect setting for that program, which weaved individual movements from five Palestrina masses with standalone pieces from the time period, including Gregorio Allegri's 'Miserere,' maybe one of the most mythologized pieces of music in human history. For that piece, one ensemble of five singers stood front and center in the apse with another crew of four placed in the side balcony, and one tenor on the lectern threaded the needle with the simple but crucial chants that connected the choral passages. Hearing it live in that setting and performed with such expertise was an experience akin to (theoretically) watching the 'Pietà' being sculpted, if the 'Pietà' had been made of ephemeral sand rather than sturdy marble. As an encore the group whipped out Purcell's 'Hear My Prayer, O Lord' and polished its dissonances to an eerie shine.
Wednesday's program proved stronger than the Scholars' Monday evening show at Jordan Hall, which brought out the English Cornett and Sackbut ensemble for the first piece — a mighty performance of Lassus's 'Omnes de Saba,' with the united winds roaring along. All then exited so the stage setup could be reconfigured by a lone heroic stagehand, a process that seemed to take about as long as the piece itself had.
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After that, no more brass and winds appeared until the final pieces of the second half. The evening had fine performances all around from both ensembles; did the directors worry people might leave at intermission if they didn't hear any sackbuts right away? More rehearsal and better planning might have helped.
The 10:30 p.m. concert slot each night
tends to feel like an intimate secret club, where one might find something they'd hear nowhere else. Lute songs are hardly rare repertoire, but interpreters as astute as tenor Aaron Sheehan (a BEMF regular who's also performing in the mainstage opera, Reinhard Keiser's 'Octavia') and festival co-artistic director Paul O'Dette? That was the treat offered to Monday's night owls, a haze of songs dedicated to women and wine with highlights including a rending 'In Darkness Let Me Dwell' and a handful of silken instrumentals. The pair hailed the boozier selections with a sip of red wine.
Tuesday's late-night slot gave the Jordan Hall stage to O'Dette's longtime partner in BEMF leadership, Stephen Stubbs, and his West Coast-based Pacific MusicWorks. The program promised 'Murder, Mayhem, Melancholy and Madness,' and the balance of the program strongly tilted toward melancholy — my appetite was more for mayhem and madness than mournful dirges, especially after the previous night's lute-driven angst, but soprano Danielle Reutter-Harrah's sylvan take on Purcell's 'Bess of Bedlam' was worth keeping my eyes open for.
Earlier that same evening Jordan Hall hosted the local premiere of Boston Camerata's 'A Gallery of Kings,' an eclectic program of the triumphs, trials, and tribulations of power in medieval Europe. It featured four male singers, director-soprano Anne Azéma, and two versatile instrumentalists — Shira Kammen on harp and vielle (medieval violin ancestor) and Dan Meyers with an arsenal of wind and percussion instruments.
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The material was grouped loosely according to subject matter — here abusive kings, here courageous kings, here kings in love — and addressed rulers both historical and fictional. It was all handsomely performed, if somewhat all over the place in focus. Azéma and Kammen locked in on a brightly saucy Provencal troubadour song, and bass-baritone John Taylor Ward frankly stunned with King David's lamentation for Jonathan, inhabiting the music with genuinely wrenching grief that never approached schmaltz or camp as Kammen's vielle keened along.
But the most memorable performance so far has been that by the Oslo-based Trio Mediaeval, which is approaching its 30th anniversary with 66 percent of its founding members (Anna Maria Friman and Andrea Fuglseth) still on board. Songs of praise by Hildegard von Bingen and polyphony by English composer Leonel Power braided seamlessly with the 14th-century Tournai Mass, the movements of which were likely written by different composers across several decades. Guest instrumentalist Kevin Devine improvised accompaniment on hurdy-gurdy and organetto, which can be most easily described as a harp-size pipe organ that balances on the player's knee. Friman also occasionally deployed a Hardanger fiddle — the national instrument of Norway, a violin that features additional unplayed strings for extra resonance.
The instrument postdates the repertoire they were singing by a couple hundred years, but historical accuracy was not the goal; had that been so, they likely wouldn't have been singing the Tournai Mass at all, as it almost definitely would have been sung by men. If the Tallis Scholars brought to mind images of stone cathedrals, the Trio evoked a wooden stave church. There was a wild streak in their sound that should not be confused for lack of cohesion or discipline; rather, their individual voices were clear and distinctive even when singing as a unit, and out of those differences they alchemized unity.
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The title of Wednesday's program, 'love abounds in everything,' might well be this group's philosophy. Hopefully they'll be back before too long.
BOSTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL
Through June 15. Various venues.
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
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