My tendency is to lump Byrd in with Thomas Tallis, John Dowland, and Orlando Gibbons as agreeable composers of mostly rich, somber, and ecclesiastical music from the era when "standard" chord progressions did not yet exist. The musical lines, so I thought, tended to fold back upon themselves in peculiar ways, in ever-shifting cadences, all within a narrow range of intervals, rather than marking out an exposition, a secondary theme, a variation or two, a return, a coda, and a finale.
The pieces in Stile Antico's program confirmed that assessment. Which is not to say they were bad. On the contrary. It was as if we had entered a musical world based on an entirely different set of suppositions, the result being less like narrative adventures suitable for a Buster Keaton movie and more like ever-changing waves of sound, with voices rising and falling, appearing and disappearing, and harmonies squeezing into odd shapes as the individual voices followed their distinctive paths.
The textbook term for this musical approach is "polyphony," as we were reminded during the "pub quiz" during intermission, but it's worth pointing out, I think, that the polyphony of the Renaissance is far more peculiar than that of the Baroque. (The harmonic patterns of Machaut and Dufay, from an earlier period, are stranger still. ) Bach later made use of the same approach, and arguably brought it to an unparalleled expressive peak, but his works have far fewer of those bizarre harmonies and surprising cadences than do the works of Byrd and his contemporaries. Bach's music always seems to be going somewhere. Byrd's often seems to say, "Let's turn back and relish what we've already got." And more than occasionally they get caught up in harmonic eddies and backwaters offering no obvious means of escape. Yet escape they do.
Such theoretical niceties are difficult to discuss, and I suspect I've made a hash of it here. Which may explain why the interpretive material in the Schubert Club program and the review in the Star Tribune a few days later focused less on the musical elements of the performance than on the challenges Byrd faced as a practicing Catholic in the protestant court of Queen Elizabeth I.
We left the Landmark Center enriched and subdued. I'm sure I'll never hear Byrd sung better—though I think back fondly to a performance of the Concert of Music with Emma Kirky in the basement of a church in Edinburgh, circa 1983.
But I think the stuff they were singing was Italian.
Two days later we were back at the Landmark Center in St. Paul to hear a free courtroom recital by mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski and pianist Ahmed Anzaldúa in a program featuring Brahms, Catalan composer and pianist Federico Mompou, and several local composers. Clara is one of our favorites, and I was also looking forward to the crisp sound of a piano, after all those gorgeous waves of Renaissance vocal shape-shifting. The performance did not disappoint.
To my ear the Mompou pieces were the best of the lot. They had just the right amount of strange modernist digression in the piano line, and the lyrics were sheer poetry, though a bit over the top:
Above
you are only the flowers.
They
were like a white offering:
The
light that they shone on your body
will
never again belong to the branch.
An
entire life of perfume
with
their kiss was given to you.
You
were radiant in the light,
treasured
by your closed eyes.
That
I could have been the flower’s sigh!
Given
myself, like a lily, to you, that my life
might
wither over your breast.
And
never again to know the night,
that
from your side has vanished.
The texts chosen by the other composers concerned themselves with red-winged blackbirds, a feather, and rabbits. Several of the poets involved were in the room, and MC Abbie Betinis invited them up to discuss their work, which is often difficult for a poet to do. But little matter. Clara's rich, soaring vocals held our attention in any case, and in the context of these fresh, modern works, the three Brahms pieces at the end of the program sounded tuneful and harmonically straightforward, almost like folk songs.
On our way back to Minneapolis we stopped in at Gai Noi, a new Laotian restaurant facing Loring Park that's been getting a lot of press. By an utterly strange coincidence—we don't eat out much—we had already been to chef Ann Ahmed's two other restaurants, Lat 14 and Khaluna. Here the food is just as good (or almost) and both the prices and the tipping practices are more reasonable.
Our waiter was a boy wonder: attentive, articulate, knowledgeable, and gracious. The afternoon was gray, and looking out from our table at the window, I almost got the impression it was going to snow.
We don't get down to Loring Park much these days, and it was a pleasure simply to walk past the gardens on the way to our car, watching a flock of white pigeons swooping back and forth amid the trees.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment