Madtown Sounds: Madison Early Music Festival

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending four concerts at this year's Madison Early Music Festival. It's a program that's put together by the University of Wisconsin School of Music, combining aspects of an academic conference (including classes and lectures) and a concert series with performers from all over. This year's festival (the fifth annual) featured Renaissance-era Italian music. I didn't go to all of the concerts offered, and I missed all of the public lectures, but here's what I did get to enjoy. The first concert was an evening of Monteverdi madrigals performed by La Venexiana, with unaccompanied voices in complex harmonies, perfectly blended and spine-tingling. The next night's program featured historical harps: who knew there were so many? Baroque harp; Renaissance harp; double harp; bray harp; medieval harp; and gothic harp. The music produced by these instruments (expertly played, of course) was unbelievably evocative. It sent me into romanticized imaginings of life way back when (redacting the nasty-, brutish- and short-ness of it all, naturally). The program that night was nicely varied, including a (too-)short interlude of "improvisations on traditional Sephardic melodies" on harp, and a series of songs accompanied by storyteller narration and dance, based on a Venetian folk tale (which, it turned out, was the same fidelity-testing folk tale that's the central plot device in Cymbeline). The next concert was devoted to Italian dramatic laments, performed by The Catacoustic Consort. The period instruments in this performance included the lirone, the viola da gamba, the theorbo and the baroque triple harp. The soprano featured with the consort, Catherine Webster, was incredible. More than just a pretty voice, she had a wonderful ability to tone the vibrato way down to enhance her expressiveness, yet able to bust out with full operatic chops at just the right moments. The highlight of the evening was Monteverdi's famed Lamento d'Arianna, but I also enjoyed the three Jacopo Peri pieces included in the program. Given that I don't warm up to a lot of operatic music, I was surprised at how much I loved these pieces (realizing only moments after my own enthusiastic clapping: "Wait a minute...these are arias!"), as both Peri and Monteverdi are credited with creating the first works in the opera form (Monteverdi with L'Orfeo, and Peri with Dafne and Euridice). I can't say my ambivalence about opera is as vehement (or as well-expressed) as Mencken's, but there is something to be said for experiencing this kind of music without extravagant trappings, in pure and clear voices serving the integrity of the song's emotion. The last of the concerts I attended featured sets by two early music groups, The Newberry Consort and Piffaro, including more exotic historic instruments: shawms; sackbuts; bagpipes and dulcians. Don't be fooled by the names of the groups (a little staid? a little twee?)—these performers jammed with the verve and spontaneity of a band. The program ended with Monteverdi's Beatus Vir performed by the music festival faculty, full chorus, all hands on deck. I cannot imagine a better way to have ended the evening. After the program, I walked out into the quiet, warm summer night, with "Beatus vir/beatus vir..." ringing in my head.

Comments

[Robert the Llama Butcher]

Wow. I'm getting drool all over my keyboard just typing about this!

[Chan S.]

Whoa--don't short out your keyboard! Seriously, though, it was pretty fabulous.