Catacoustic Consort Mixes It Up
The early music group Catacoustic Consort concluded its 15th consecutive season with an informal afternoon concert April 26 in the chapel of the Church of the Redeemer in Hyde Park.
An ensemble of five viola da gamba players took up the challenge of playing music from the early 16th century through contemporary works by Michael Edwards, Tan Dun, Peter Sculthorpe, Gavin Bryars and Elvis Costello.
Taking the audience through five centuries of writing for the viola da gamba, Annalisa Pappano, David Morris, Stephen Goist, Larry Lipnik and Joanna Blendulf played assertively throughout the concert, moving from the delicate filigree of Hugh Ashton's "Maske," to the dense chromaticism of compositions by Cipriano Da Rore and Carlo Gesualdo, both rebellious exponents of a musical counter-culture that alarmed the conservative academicians of their time, and both masters of a kind of chromaticism and tonal ambiguity predating by four centuries the arrival of the Second Viennese School.
Henry Purcell's Fantasy No. 5 followed and in the second half, a bucolic rhapsody by the lesser-known Englishwoman Freda Burford. Two short pieces by Christopher Tye and Alessandro Agricola, plus a curio by Picforth (no known first name) titled "In Nomine" came next, the latter a composition in which each of the musicians plays in a different meter. Interspersing the old with the new, the Catacoustic players next essayed Gavin Bryars' similarly titled "In Nomine," itself a sort of minimalist riff on a 17th-century Purcell work.
Catacoustic Consort invited Michael Maniaci to sing a pair of selections. Tan Dun's "A Sinking Love" was introduced by the singer, who spoke about the creation and meaning of the work. Based on a sixth-century C.E. poem by Chinese poet Tao Li, the composition adopts vocal techniques from traditional Beijing Opera, including downward and upward glissandi, guttural sounds, whispers and sudden leaps into the higher territory of the soprano range.
Maniaci is a male soprano, not a countertenor that sings in a highly developed male falsetto. Ibnstead, his voice inhabits the soprano register, singing with very good technique, suppleness and intelligence. He handled the vocal mine field of Tan Dun's composition with aplomb.
At the end of the concert, Maniaci sang Elvis Costello's "Put Away Forbidden Playthings," and followed it with an un-programmed selection, Benjamin Britten's setting of "The Sally Gardens," treating both with the same kind of refined musicality that his colleagues displayed in the accompaniment.
By Rafael de Acha
Rafael de Acha regularly writes on music, opera, dance and theatre for www.seenandheardinternational.com and for his own blog/website www.musicforallseasonscincinnati.com. This review first appeared on those sites.