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Red Priest
An authentically freewheeling blast
March 6, 2012
A product of culture is
never just an artifact, a thing. It is also a repository of
the ideas, beliefs, practices, aspirations, limitations --
the list goes on -- of its historical context. Too, the way
a cultural product is experienced is one of its essential
qualities, and experience is unavoidably fluid, like the
river you can’t step into twice.
Over the past few decades, musicians aligned with the
“historically informed performance” movement have come
reasonably close to reproducing the style and sonic
character of music from the baroque period -- the artifacts
as they sounded at birth, to the extent that research has
been able to illuminate.
In a superbly played and deliciously entertaining concert,
March 4 in Temple Beth-El, the baroque quartet Red Priest
went a step further, giving the audience a sense of how the
original listeners might have experienced the music as an
expression of contemporary (to them) culture. The local
presenter was the San Antonio Chamber Music Society.
Musical practice in 17th
and 18th-century Europe was closer to jazz in some respects
than to the classical music industry of the present.
Intellectual property protections were virtually nil, so
composers often appropriated themes from each other.
Composers did not always specify the instrumentation for
pieces, and even when they did so it was common for
performances to be put together with whatever instruments
happened to be available in any particular place. Musicians
were expected to improvise. A particularly impressive
improvised solo might be written down by another musician
who happened to hear it, just as today great jazz solos are
transcribed from recordings and made available in musical
notation for other musicians to play.
Most important, when this music was new it was ... well,
new. And that is how these performances sounded.
Most of the program
consisted of Red Priest’s own arrangements for its
contingent of recorders (Piers Adams), violin (David
Greenberg), cello (Angela East) and harpsichord (David
Wright, playing a French-style instrument built by Gerald
Self of San Antonio).
Individually and as a group, they all proved to be amazingly
gifted musicians.
Mr. Wright attained the zenith of virtuosity in William
Babell’s contemporaneous transcription of Handel’s
improvisation on an aria from “Rinaldo,” with over-the-top
showy roller-coaster runs. Mr. Adams, playing recorders
ranging from bass to sopranino, demonstrated astonishing
dexterity and clarity in everything he played, including an
assortment of hornpipes strung together as a natural segue
from an allegro movement of Bach’s Violin Sonata in G,
BWV 1019. Mr. Greenberg and Ms. East played with the kind of
rhythmic verve and snap that would be approved equally by
baroque specialists, bluegrass string players and (in GP
Telemann’s “Gypsy” Sonata in A Minor, equipped with
insinuating slides) the strolling musicians at a Hungarian
restaurant.
Much of Red Priest’s
authenticity is in its refusal to make a fetish of
authenticity.
J.S. Bach probably would not have expected to hear his C
Minor Prelude and Fugue from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” in
an arrangement for four players, but audiences of Bach’s
time would not have been surprised to hear almost anything
played by almost any kind of ensemble --and credited to a
different composer, to boot.
A quartet arrangement of Giuseppe Tartini’s “Senti lo mare,”
originally for solo violin, was embellished with the sounds
of surf (Mr. Adams blowing into a finger hole of his
recorder) and sea birds (Mr. Greenberg and Ms. East playing
in their high registers). Musicians of Tartini’s time
probably wouldn’t have done that, but this piece, like much
of baroque music, was intended to evoke extra-musical
real-world sounds, so the added atmospherics suited the
spirit of the piece.
An 18th-century performance of Vivaldi’s “Sea Storm”
Concerto, whether or not in its original instrumentation,
probably would not include an interpolated hornpipe, but it
might well include some material that Vivaldi didn’t
compose. Similarly, an 18th century audience might applaud
the enterprise of an ensemble that inserted its own Middle
Eastern and Spanish-style variations in Arcangelo Corelli's
Concert Fantasy on "La Filia." A jazz variation? Why
not?
Perhaps the musicians ought to have stopped short of calling
“Ship ahoy!” in the midst of Vivaldi’s concerto. Then
again....
Mike Greenberg
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