Across 500 years: Piffaro teams with Orchestra 2001 (1st review)

A joint concert that teams Piffaro with Orchestra 2001 may sound like an odd idea. Piffaro plays Renaissance music on Renaissance instruments. Orchestra 2001 plays modern music and includes premieres of new music in almost every concert.

But the two organizations share characteristics that transcend the superficial difference in their time periods. Both present a steady stream of novelties. Both attract people who want to extend their listening experience beyond the standard 19th-Century repertoire.

You could even argue that Piffaro's 500-year-old music is just as new, in its way, as the premieres on 2001's schedule— because music groups are still discovering and exploring the thousands of scores created during the Renaissance and Baroque.

When Piffaro devotes a concert to the music written for a 16th-Century royal wedding, it's playing music that hasn't been performed for five centuries, composed in a style unique to its own time and played on instruments that can sound just as odd as the sounds that modern composers produce with synthesizers and electrified pianos.

Running's musical humor

Friday's program flitted between the old and the new with all the imagination and creativity that two creative, imaginative organizations could put into it. It presented old pieces on modern instruments, new pieces on old instruments, modern pieces that borrowed from old forms, and even a few old pieces on old instruments and new pieces on new instruments.

The major events on the menu were the two premieres created for the occasion. The first was an irresistible contribution to an under-populated musical category: genuine musical humor. Arne Running's Renaissance Redux hands three Renaissance classics to a modern brass quintet and subjects them to manipulations that are often irreverent but never mocking.

John Dowland's Lachrymose pieces are considered classics of the Elizabethan lute song repertoire, but I've always found them far too melancholy for my personal taste, whatever their musical virtues may be. Running's Dowland Download begins with appropriate somberness but soon turns Dowland's unrelenting teariness into something livelier and far more cheerful.

The third item in Running's threesome— Byrd Bash— opens with an inhumanly speeded-up version of William Byrd's Earl of Oxford's March and transfers it to New Orleans as it continues.

Smith's bird fight

The second premiere presented the results of the creative process that composer Kile Smith has described in four BSR essays. (Click here.) As Smith has explained in his essays, Red-tail and Hummingbird depicts an encounter between a hawk and an angry hummingbird determined to protect its turf. Smith composed two versions, one for Piffaro's Renaissance instruments and one for modern brass quintet.

The Piffaro version would have been exciting even if you'd never heard of the bird fight that suggested it. The confrontation between the reedy shawms and the hollower sound of the sackbuts and dulcians provided all the drama the piece needed.

Priscilla Smith produced a bravura performance on the lead shawm, chattering away at virtuoso speed, with her fingers dancing over the surface of her instrument.

Those dull modern trumpets

The modern version seemed dull by comparison. As Smith noted in the pre-concert discussion, Renaissance instruments possess more "character" than modern instruments. Every note has a different color. Modern brass quintets produce an even sound across all the instruments, and in this case the trumpet failed to produce the contrast that the shawm brought to Smith's Renaissance version. The modern version might have worked better if Smith had substituted an oboe or a flute for the trumpet.

The program's sole disappointment was a two-part sequence that featured a 1973 piece for woodwind quintet and tape by Jacob Druckman. Druckman's quintet is based on a 17th-Century aria by Francesco Cavalli and the sequence began beautifully, with early music star Julianne Baird singing the original to the accompaniment of a small instrumental group led by Christa Patton's harp.

But there was nothing beautiful about the Druckman segment. To me (and I suspect most listeners), it seemed like a collection of random sounds— all odd, most unpleasant. It was a prime example of the kind of academic new music that repelled audiences during most of the 20th century and turned music lovers toward the Renaissance and Baroque when they went looking for alternatives to the standard Classical repertoire.

Surprising factoid

The evening included two sets for Renaissance instruments alone, both linked to the main theme. One featured Julianne Baird's pure soprano singing Renaissance songs about birds— a connection to Kile Smith's piece that set it in a historical tradition of music that suggested bird songs.

The other began with Piffaro playing a 16th-Century motet from the choir loft at the rear of Trinity Center. Then Piffaro's musicians hopped to the 21st Century and played a sonata from the brilliant Kile Smith Vespers, which they premiered in 2008.

The concert produced a surprising factoid. For most of my adult life, I've been told that Baroque musicians played at a lower, less penetrating pitch than their modern counterparts. That's true, but it seems Renaissance wind musicians actually played at a higher pitch.

And now, six centuries

The evening opened with the two bands playing a group of Renaissance pieces together, at modern pitch. They closed the program together again, playing Renaissance dances at Renaissance pitch.

The two sets provided an overture and finale that summed up the concert's overall message— pushing both groups in new directions and generating blends and contrasts that neither could create alone.

The last 40 years have given Philadelphians both a resurgence in new music and a flourishing early music movement. The joint concert celebrated an achievement we can all contemplate with pleasure: a musical culture that now spans six centuries and looks to the future with a new sense of adventure.♦


To read another\ comment on this concert by Dan Coren, click here.
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