Quiet & Dignified, If a Bit Dull

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The New York Sun

Soprano Julianne Baird is one of the 10 most recorded classical artists in the world today, with over 125 CDs to her credit. But don’t feel out of touch if you are not familiar with Ms. Baird, as her art is rather specialized and arcane.

She was the special guest of the viol group Parthenia at the Metropolitan Museum Tuesday night, as the museum continued its excellent series of concerts for Christmas with an exploration of English music titled “As It Fell on a Holie Eve.”

The museum really does Christmas right and Parthenia worked very hard to make its particular repertoire — which can seem, truth be told, somewhat arid — as interesting and entertaining as possible.

Parthenia consists of four viols, just enough to qualify as a consort. The group (Rosamund Morley, Lawrence Lipnik, Beverly Au, and Lisa Terry) produces a high quality sound, even though the idea of vibrato is verboten. Fortuitously, the reverberant acoustics of the museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall — all decked out with a 20-foot Christmas tree and their magnificent Neapolitan Baroque crèche — helped to resonate the individual sonic moments even against the best efforts of the players.

Each performer holds their viol between their legs like a cello. This does not seem to be a problem for Ms. Morley, whose treble instrument is about the size of a modern viola, but did appear to be a physical strain for Ms. Au and Ms. Terry, who play the bass viol. The genius that invented the spike — the metal shaft that anchors the modern cello and bass to the floor — was apparently not born by Elizabethan times, and so lower viol players have to get creative. Ms. Terry solves the problem by sitting on two chairs, extending the length of the fulcrum to alleviate some pressure on her thighs and calves.

Exhibiting intelligent programming, Parthenia varied this concert as much as possible considering the narrow range of its repertoire. The program offered work by nearly a dozen composers, and alternated between accompanied vocal numbers and straight instrumental ones. There was an emphasis on William Byrd, the acknowledged master of the era, and a healthy variety of styles, touching on the popular, the religious, and the realm of higher art (there was no sense of “classical” music in those days).

For such a successful singer, Ms. Baird unveiled a surprisingly wee voice, one that was often virtually inaudible even in the second row of seats, although the parabolic acoustics of the garden may have projected her tones more strongly to the back of the hall. She completely eschews any vibration of her vocal cords and thus comes off rather modishly dry as dust, and the echo chamber of the room did not enhance her musicality. The period practice fundamentalists have created, depending on your point of view, either a beautiful flower that has blossomed or a pernicious tumor that has metastasized throughout the world of musical performance. It is from modern interpretations of the music of this period of English culture whence this colorless didacticism originated.

Some highlights of the evening included the nimble rapid passagework of Ms. Terry in Peter Phillips’s Galiarda Passamezzo, the Irish fiddle tunes of Ms. Morley in Gigge by John Bull, the duet for two bass viols titled “The Virgin’s Muse,” by Tobias Hume, and the juxtaposition of Gentil Madonna, a consort arrangement of a Dublin manuscript for virginal — an early keyboard instrument — with the vocalized “Sweet was the Song the Virgin Sung.”

Of course, there was more to the Elizabethan era than Greensleeves, but no self-respecting survey concert of the period would be complete without a rendition of this infectious tune with faint Oriental modality. I attempted to look up “Anonymous” in my Groves, as Parthenia offered his mid-17th century “divisions” on the famous tune, but found no pertinent facts about him. Today we would call the “divisions” variations, but they were indeed diverse, including some strumming of the bass viols and the addition of Ms. Baird weaving the words of the traditional carol “The Old Year Now Away Is Fled” into the tapestry. Altogether this was a quiet and dignified program, albeit a little on the dull side.

The Metropolitan was just the right place for this type of presentation, as it houses one of the world’s most important exhibits of old musical instruments. Many in the classical community worry that their art form is rapidly becoming strictly a museum piece, as contemporary composition has turned disturbingly formulaic and user-unfriendly. How long will it be before some intellectually curious audience of the future comes only to a museum to hear the forgotten works of Bartok, Berg, or Prokofiev?


The New York Sun

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