Newberry Consort serves up a smart and stylish valentine of Renaissance love songs
Valentine’s Day may be for lovers yet Friday was also an occasion for early music aficionados to savor Renaissance vocal and instrumental miniatures celebrating the many aspects of love, from pleasurable to painful, courtly to carnal.
“So Sweet Is Your Return” was the double-entendre title of the Newberry Consort’s illuminating exploration of mostly secular chansons and madrigals from 16th-century France and Italy, presented at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston. Repeat concerts are scheduled over the weekend in Hyde Park and downtown Chicago.
Founded 39 years ago at Chicago’s Newberry Library, the ensemble-in-residence of Chicago College of the Performing Arts has been steadily redefining its artistic objectives over the decades, introducing local listeners to the infinite variety of preclassical music as a living art form. That mission has taken on renewed vitality under Liza Malamut, now in her third season as the group’s artistic director and resident virtuoso on period trombone and recorder.
That much was clear from the fervor and polish the five singers and five instrumentalists (lute, harp, recorders and trombones) brought to a remarkably diverse tour of tender love songs, bawdy ditties, lively frottolas, frisky villanelles and the like, many of them by composers known, if at all, as mere footnotes in music history texts. English translations of the texts (Ronsard, Virgil and Petrarch were among the poets) were projected on a screen and embellished with reproductions of analogous paintings from the period. Malamut’s spoken remarks complemented her thorough and informative program notes.
As much care clearly went into the performances as went into the scholarship. Without such cleanly focused intonation, secure balancing and careful blending of voices, no degree of expressive commitment would have mattered very much. But the latter was front and center as well, a quality also conspicuous in the superb lute solos by Lucas Harris and other instrumental playing that tied together and undergirded the consort.
Way back when, the joys, hopes, fears and regrets of love were as challenging for partners to navigate as they are in the love lyrics of today’s pop music – they just were expressed more subtly and decorously.
The pain of lost love, wrote the poets behind several of these exquisite musical miniatures, cannot be doused by tears. Perhaps no poet spoke of such pain better than Virgil, whose evocation of the spurned queen Didone’s lament, affectingly set by Cipriano de Rore, anticipates a similar scene in Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens by some three centuries.
The groups of secular and sacred vocal gems making up the second half of the program carried romantic sentiment over into the realm of the erotic and ecstatic, with frisky monks, compliant nuns, randy shepherds and willing shepherdesses as main characters in a loose narrative.
There were many welcome musical discoveries. None proved as distinctive, or as emblematic of the concert as a whole, as Nicola Vicentino’s masterful setting of Petrarch’s Laura che’l verde lauro: Its strikingly modern chromaticism falls as pungently on the ear as that of the great Italian madrigalist, Carlo Gesualdo.
And what better way to bring a grand love story full circle than with party music—a lively pair of pieces by Alessandro Striggio most likely written for a Medici family wedding in Florence in 1579. Bravi all around!
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Bond Chapel, University of Chicago; and 4 p.m. Sunday at Ganz Hall, Roosevelt University. newberryconsort.org
Posted in Performances
Leave a Comment
Subscribe via RSS.