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St. Ann's Academy Chapel
June 2, 2007
In the year and a half I have been reviewing for MiV, no development on the Victoria music scene has excited me more than the premiere of the Anima Baroque Ensemble. Finally we have in Victoria a fully professional baroque ensemble performing on period instruments: the full meal deal that has eluded baroque music fans in this city. The Island Chambers Players, a fixture in the musical life of Victoria for many years, deserves a great deal of credit for having sponsored this initiative, under the joint musical direction of Christi Meyers and Mieka Kohut.
On tap for the evening was a selection of German chamber music from the middle of the seventeenth century until 1727-28. Right from the very first notes of the Johann Rosenmüller sonata that began the programme, it was apparent that Anima would live up to my hopes. Auspiciously, this piece begins with a bright, exuberant presto. It served as a kind of fanfare for the evening's performance and for the new ensemble.
Each movement of the Rosenmüller sonata is short, almost haiku-like. These short movements gave the musicians the opportunity to establish their modus operandi: like the music, each movement was individually characterised. I kept waiting throughout the evening for a leitmotif of the ensemble to emerge, but it never did. Or, paradoxically, it did. These are musicians who put the music ahead of themselves and the result is music-making that is never formulaic.
The Rosenmüller sonata was for another reason an excellent piece to inaugurate the new ensemble. It is written “a 4” so each of the four performers was given an opportunity to stake out his or her own part. At the same time, the overall result was a tight, confident performance.
Biber's Sonata Represenativa for solo violin (Meyers) and basso continuo (Tilney and Bonham) is a quirky piece of music that characterizes a rather heterogeneous collection of animals plus some musketeers. The unifying characteristic is that the violin part is quite demanding. Nevertheless, Meyers tossed off her part with aplomb. The cockadoodledoo of a rooster, the dissonant double-stoppings of a frog, the delicate cooing of a quail, the meowing of a cat and the strutting of musketeers all emerged perfectly recognisably in Meyer's performance. At the same time, the piece was rendered musically, not simply as a string of musical jokes, as is sometimes the case.
Next up was a Buxtehude's Sonata Op. 1, No. 6. Italian trio sonatas of the period were typically scored for two violins and basso continuo. In Germany, where the viola da gamba was still popular, Buxtehude wrote his trios for violin, viola da gamba and basso continuo.
I sometimes find Buxtehude's sonatas rather mannered, but I was sold on this sonata by Anima's performance. It was, by turns, impetuous and lyrical. The central movement, marked con discretione, was played with suitable but unexaggerated freedom. Bonham comfortably rose to the challenges posed by the demanding viol part. Particularly noteworthy was the imaginative continuo playing of Tilney.
After the intermission we were treated to two of Froberger's works for solo harpsichord, his Toccata No. 3 and Suite No. 6 from 1649. I was particularly struck by Tilney's performance of the first movement of the suite, a lament on the death of a son of the Emperor. Froberger's lamentos are often given rather over the top performances. Tilney's approach was quite different: subtle and understated but deeply affecting.
The penultimate piece of the programme was another quirky sonata representiva: Telemann's Gulliver Suite for Two Violins (without bass). After the short Intrada, we get four movements representing the inhabitants of the four lands that Gulliver visited in the course of Swift's book: the tiny people of Lilliput, the giants of Brobdingnag, the woolly-minded philosophers of Laputa (in Swift, this part of the book is a parody of the Royal Society) and finally the well-mannered Houyhnhnms (intelligent horses) and the unruly Yahoos (humans).
Telemann obviously had fun with this piece. The Chaconne of the Lilliputians is notated in (if memory serves) 1/128th notes while the Brobdingnagian Gigue is written in whole notes. While this is a novelty item, and Meyers and Kohut entered into the humorous spirit of the piece, the performance was still highly musical.
The evening concluded with an arrangement of one of the organ trios (BWV 527) that Bach wrote for his son, Wilhelm Friedemann. Although this was one of the finest pieces of music on the programme, it was the one item that left me a little dissatisfied. I found the performance a little lethargic compared to many of the fine performances I have heard of this work. Perhaps I was just hoping that the concert would end with a piece in a major key.
Despite this qualification, this was a delightful evening and the founding of this ensemble is something to celebrate. If you had walked into a church somewhere in Europe - in Oxford, perhaps, or in Graz or Florence - and heard this concert, you would have gone away with a good impression of the local baroque musicianship. I am certain that if any tourists wandered into last night's concert, they went away similarly impressed.
We should not be surprised by the initial success of this ensemble. Meyers and Kohut are accomplished young musicians and Bonham is one of the most experienced performers of baroque music in Western Canada. Colin Tilney, whose tutelage Meyers acknowledged, is a distinguished figure on the international early music scene. His influence was evident in the gimmick-free, thoughtful performances. As Meyers acknowledged, the ensemble has room to get better at performing baroque repertoire, but it is already very good.
I should also say a word about the Chapel at St. Ann's Academy. It is a delightful place to hear a concert. It could, itself, be found in almost any Roman Catholic area of Europe. Still, I wish Anima such success that the ensemble soon outgrows the confines of this space.
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