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St. Matthias Anglican Church
June 6, 2013
La Rose des Vents is in town to participate in Saturday's performance of the Monteverdi Vespers featuring the Victoria Philharmonic Choir. Having come all the way from Montreal, the ensemble figured that they might as well do another performance on their own, thus providing local audiences with a rare opportunity to hear a renaissance wind band. (Rare, but not unprecedented. To my certain knowledge three similar ensembles have performed in Victoria: Piffaro, Ciaramella and ¡Sacabuche! The last named of these ensembles will appear again in Victoria this coming October 5th in the Early Music Society of the Islands series (www.earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca). And we should not forget that Victoria is home its own renaissance wind band: A Great Noyse (www.greatnoyse.com).
The concert presented almost the full gamut of music for early wind band: everything from arrangements of liturgical music (by Orlando de Lassus and Francisco Guerrero), to music of the German municipal wind bands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to music of the English court (Locke and Gibbons) to the great Venetian composers for sackbuts and cornetts (Gabrieli and Merulo). There was even a piece by Guerrero preserved in a Mexican source. In total, eighteen composers, including the prolific anonymous, were represented on the programme. Five of these composers were completely new to me - which is saying something. I listen to a lot of early music.
The large number of composers and compositions makes it impractical to talk about each piece. Suffice it to say that the musicians tossed off everything with aplomb. For much of the sixteenth century, cornett players were the rock stars, eclipsing even the violinists. Consequently some of the music is quite virtuosic, but everything was rendered with seeming effortlessness. (My guess is that is actually quite difficult to make a cornett sound so good.)
The members of La Rose des Vents are clearly musicians who take their scholarship seriously, and they made every effort to perform in a historically appropriate style. But while they may be scholarly, they wear their scholarship lightly and their performances were unfailingly appealing. As is appropriate they embellish the music. I noticed a particularly nice flourish by Jennejohn at the conclusion of a Pavan and Galliard by Holbourne.
If I had to pick out a few highlights, I would talk first about the Sonata No.31 of Johannes Vierdanck (c. 1605-46). This work is a bit more expansive that some of the pieces on the programme and the musicians did an excellent job of rendering the echo effect. I also loved the arrangement, by Ottavio Bargnani (fl. 1605-27), of the popular tune, known as La Monica (and in France as Une jeune fillette) - La Rose des Vents made it clear why this was one of the international smash hits of the 16th and 17th centuries.
I enjoyed the way that the musicians varied the programme by employing different combinations of instruments, different sorts of cornetts (including a "mute cornett") and recorders.
The concert featured one piece of new music, Canzona sopra Il Vasaio by the ensemble's Catherine Motuz. Composed on the occasion of the wedding of one of her friends, who requested a composition based on "the happiest theme." The piece, written in a style reminiscent of the renaissance, begins with a suitably exuberant opening section. A more reflective part ensues and then the original them and the original mood return. All in all, the composition is skillfully handled, good fun and fit seamlessly into a programme of early music.
Contrary to what Peter Butterfield indicated in his pre-concert remarks, the cornett and the sackbut did not immediately die out after the 17th century, but lingered on into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The instruments did recede to the peripheries of musical life. The Danish/Norwegian composer Johan Daniel Berlin (1714-87) composed a Sinfonia for cornett. The instruments also remained part of folk music. Sackbut and cornett ensembles remained active in Germany into the nineteenth century. Thomas Hardy mentions that the Mellstock Quire (in Under the Greenwood Tree) plays, among other instruments, a serpent, a relative of the cornett - likely other members of the "quire" were playing sackbuts and ordinary cornetts. Fortunately, the instruments have now been revived and live again in the able hands of skilled musicians, such as those who play in La Rose des Vents.
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