Music Review
Tracing the Evolution of Sacred Song
By Allan Kozinn - Published: September 25, 2007
The first New York Early Music Celebration, in 2004, was an explosion of pre-Romantic repertory: 63 performances in 10 days, with New York’s period-instrument bands and early-music choirs working hard to battle assertions that the scene is livelier in Boston. A second celebration, planned for 2006, was postponed until this year.
Along the way the festival, which opened on Sunday, was reconfigured. It is a bit larger than the first: its prospectus (available at nyemc.com) lists 76 events. But it is also more diffuse, and likely to make less of a splash. Instead of packing everything into an energizing 10 days, this year’s celebration runs for nearly seven weeks, through Nov. 8.
And although some performances are being staged specifically for the celebration, the schedule takes in early-music concerts that would be happening anyway, celebration or not: installments of Music Before 1800 or the Clarion Concerts, for example.
Whatever its organizational and conceptual shortcomings, the celebration is offering a broad survey of early repertory, with focused explorations by groups that specialize in specific corners of it, as well as broader overviews by generalists like Amuse, a 17-voice choir founded in 2002, and directed by Kristina Boerger.
At its Sunday afternoon concert at the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch, where it is a resident ensemble, Amuse traced the development of sacred music from the barely adorned piety of medieval English chant to the more florid settings of the German and Italian Baroque.
The program’s central structural elements were three Magnificat settings. The first, a Salisbury chant — an English recasting of Gregorian plainsong — was a picture of simplicity: much of the text is chanted on a single tone, with movement only at the beginning and end of a line. In this arrangement by Alexander Blachly (the director of the group Pomerium), part of the choir provided a drone beneath the chant. It was an ideal way to introduce this choir’s charms, which include a pure, transparent tone and solid ensemble.
The second Magnificat, by John Dunstable, is from the late end of the medieval English repertory, and represents an enormous leap forward: namely, triadic harmony. (The bridge between plainsong and Dunstable was the primitive polyphony of a 12th-century setting of “Stillat in Stellam Radium.”)
A late Renaissance Magnificat would have been in order, but Amuse devoted the Renaissance section of its program to other things: a lovely Agnus Dei by Hans Leo Hassler, a rhythmically complex “Pueri Concinite” by Jacob Handl and a harmonically rich “Duo Seraphim” by Tomás Luis Victoria. So its final Magnificat was an appealingly florid late Baroque version by Nicola Porpora.
Here, and in a handful of short Telemann works, Ms. Boerger and her Amuse singers brought clarity to the music’s comparatively thick textures. But this choir’s real magic is in its delicate balance of serenity and intensity.
The New York Early Music Celebration continues tomorrow afternoon with a free violin recital by Aaron Brown at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue at 51st Street; nyemc.com.
Music Review
A Mass Revived, With Something Extra
By Allan Kozinn - published: June 14, 2010
Heitor Villa-Lobos was a remarkably prolific composer, but in the United States he is known mainly for his guitar music, his “Bachianas Brasileiras” — a set of Brazilian-flavored glosses on Bach — and a handful of colorful orchestral scores. Occasionally, an ensemble digs more deeply into his catalog and helps fill out the picture, as the women’s chamber choir Amuse did on Sunday afternoon when it revived Villa-Lobos’s appealing “Missa São Sebastião,” the centerpiece of its program at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side. Amuse, which consisted of a dozen singers here (its roster ranges from 12 to 16), also picked up on a recent trend in Mass performances.
Time was when choirs would sing only the movements of the Ordinary, the handful of sections common to all Masses regardless of the liturgical occasion, and therefore the ones composers address. Lately, the fashion — adopted here by Amuse — has been to approximate complete services by interspersing plainchant, motets and other sacred settings among the Mass movements.
The group made some interesting choices. Except for the plainchant and a version of “The Lord’s Prayer” by the contemporary composer John Tavener, the additions were from the 16th and early 17th centuries. Among them, Byrd’s “Justorum animae” and a chant, “Gloriosus Deus in sanctis,” were presented between Villa-Lobos’s Gloria and Credo. Giovanni Maria Nanino’s “Laetamini in Domino” was sung as the Offertory, and Mr. Tavener’s work and another chant (“Multitudo languentium,” as the Communion) preceded the Agnus Dei.
The program ended with Victoria’s “Gaudent in caelis” and Palestrina’s beautifully serene “Surrexit in pastor bonus.” This may seem like a lot of leaping backward and forward in time. But the Villa-Lobos, very much in the spirit of its Renaissance predecessors, sat easily beside the earlier music. Like its companion pieces, it has soaring soprano lines and smoothly flowing polyphony, with only occasional touches of light chromaticism and mild dissonance to betray its 20th-century provenance. Mr. Tavener’s work was similarly traditional in harmony and gesture.
The singers, conducted by Phillip Cheah, had rough moments early on, most notably in the Villa-Lobos Gloria, where entrances were ragged and balances askew. The church’s reverberance smoothed over these flaws to a degree, and in any case, Mr. Cheah and his singers soon found themselves. Except for those fleeting moments, the choir sang with the warm tone and carefully calibrated blend that have distinguished its past performances.