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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
January 11, 2020
Look for "music" in the index of any book of quotations (my "go tos" are the Oxford Dictionary and Bartlett's) and easily the most-quoted author is William Shakespeare.
Given that he is also by far the source of more quotes than anyone else (seventy-two pages in the Oxford, sixty-five, somewhat larger, in Bartlett's) this is hardly surprising, yet one cannot help but feel that music was something special in Shakespeare's eyes; it is hard to imagine somebody to whom music meant little coming up with the music-lover's most essential quote, from The Merchant of Venice: "The man that hath no music in himself / Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils".
We also know that the original productions of Shakespeare's plays contained both incidental music and performed songs, even if we have no notated examples.
One can only imagine, then, that the Baltimore Consort were spoilt for choice when it came to assembling The Food of Love, their programme of Shakespearean music, which they brought to the Conservatory's Alix Goolden Performance Hall on Saturday night.
I should immediately point out that, given that there were some twenty-eight individual pieces performed, a detailed account of each of them would be both very long and (probably) very dull. Not to mention the fact that I should fairly quickly run out of superlatives to apply. I should love simply to concentrate on the evening's highlights, but that would not be possible either, because of the complete absence of anything one might deem a lowlight. I shall, therefore, choose a few individual items, more-or-less at random, to stand for the entire programme, which was simply outstanding and already seems destined to be one of the year's highlights.
The items were grouped by play, a fine conceit even when the connection was somewhat tangential, as in the opening Kemp's Jig, possibly written to celebrate Will Kemp's famous nine-day Morris Dance from London to Norwich (the origin of the phrase "nine day wonder"). Kemp's journey was made only after he had parted company with The Lord Chamberlain's Men in early 1599. Despite the success of his 1600 "stunt" he all but disappeared thereafter and may have died in 1603.
Kemp allegedly played Touchstone in As You Like It, hence the jig's presence alongside "It was a Lover and his Lass". I was particularly taken by the wonderful, almost pointilliste texture of the ensemble in the jig, before being quite bowled over by the delightful singing of Danielle Svonavec, which combined a beautiful voice, tremendous sensitivity and superb diction. I had though that Custer LaRue would be a hard act to follow, but Svonavec proved a more than worthy successor.
According to Twelfth Night's Sir Toby Belch, Malvolio — he of the yellow stockings and crossed garters — was a "Peg-a-Ramsey" and Mark Cudek stood to give a sparkling performance on the cittern of William Ballet's piece of that name. The final piece related to the play was The Buffens, from Jean d'Estrée's Tuiers livre de danseries, which began as a lute-and-viol duet before encompassing all the players in the dance. And there was a clear connection between this notated music and the jigs and reels so common in folk music.
Romeo and Juliet brought more mesmerising singing from Svonavec, elevating the mood far above teenage angst, whereas with John Dowland's Fancy in the Henry IV Part 2 & The Winter's Tale section (I am still wondering quite why they were coupled) we were suddenly in the presence of a truly great composer and, in Ronn McFarlane, a truly great lutenist.
The Carman's Whistle, (referenced by Falstaff) essentially consists of a sequence of double-entendres and it enabled Svonavec to display her saucy side, to the audience's delight and amusement.
Perhaps the section dedicated to Hamlet was the profoundest, in keeping with the play itself. It featured no fewer than three pieces by Dowland and one possibly (italics not mine) by the great man.
I must also mention Mindy Rosenfeld's playing of the bagpipes in this connection. For many non-Scots the bagpipes have a bad name — Sir Thomas Beecham once recommended the instrument to a lady wondering what instrument her child should take up, on the grounds that they "sound exactly the same when you have finished learning then as when you started" — probably because the Great Highland Bagpipes tended to have at least one quarter-tone in their tuning, doubtless making them fearsome on the field of battle, but perhaps somewhat less enjoyable in the concert hall or theatre. I am not sure precisely which kind of bagpipes Rosenfeld was playing, as the pipes are known in many parts of the world, but in her hands they made an enchanting and altogether delectable sound.
John Johnson's version of Greensleeves, which opened the Tempest section, proved to vary in certain details from the version with we are all familiar, probably from Vaughan Williams' Fantasia, but it was nevertheless clearly the same tune. Willow Song from Othello proved achingly sad and left us in need of the concluding hi-jinks from A Midsummer Night's Dream, for which the term "puckish" was le most juste in several ways, with Ben Jonson's The Mad, Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow summoning forth laughter and bringing the audience to their feet at its close.
There was only one moment in the entire evening which struck a very slightly false note: for the Gravedigger Song, from Hamlet, Svonavec dressed in overalls and a toque, which were entirely appropriate, but she also adopted an accent which put me in mind of nothing so much as Dick van Dyke's "cockney" chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, an accent which has never come from the lips of any real English person. But this was truly a minor blemish.
Everything else was performed at the stratospherically high level which we have come to expect from the Baltimore Consort who, after almost forty years, have lost none of their enthusiasm and are still at the very peak of their form.
They are, surely, one of the world's finest and most consistently entertaining early music ensembles.
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