Time-hopping with Ancient Instruments

For the second concert of its annual spring festival, the American Society of Ancient Instruments leaped across a major historical divide during the intermission. In the first half, its core ensemble played 17th- and 18th-Century music on viols, harpsichord and Baroque strings. In the second half, it switched to modern instruments so it could play 19th-Century music with its popular guest, guitarist Allen Krantz. The result was one of the most educational interludes I've experienced at a concert.

Krantz opened the second half with a melodic transcription of Bach's sixth suite for unaccompanied cello. Then he and the Society's music director, Vivian Barton Dozor, launched into a nocturne for guitar and cello by a 19th- Century composer named Friedrich Burgmuller. The moment the big emotional voice of the modern cello filled Old First Reformed, I understood why the Romantic movement had captivated Europe and swept away most of the music that preceded it. The cello part is a huge, moving song that possesses all the emotional power the Romantics valued in their music and poetry.

This piece wouldn't haven't have seemed half as powerful on a program devoted to music from its own period. When it followed the music of the first half, you heard it the way it must have sounded when it offered audiences a new approach to art.

Rise and decline of the guitar

Krantz prefaced the Burgmuller with a bit of what he called "dull guitar history." The guitar became a popular instrument during the 19th Century Romantic period, and composers created a literature that dropped into obscurity after the instrument slipped out of fashion.

Burgmuller's nocturne is a magnificent example of the riches that modern guitarists are rediscovering as they explore that period's music. The cello dominated the piece, but Krantz's nuanced finger work provided the context for the cello's aria and amplified the violence in a brief stormy section.

The Burgmuller may have helped me understand why the Romantic movement eclipsed its predecessors, but the concert's first half contained gems that demonstrated why the music of the 17th and 18th Centuries has been revived. We moderns needn't limit ourselves to one era's preoccupations. We can have it all.

A harpsichordist's moment in the spotlight

Marcia Kravis normally stays in the background, providing the harpsichord accompaniment for the strings, but she plays one solo every year, and it's usually a stunner. This year she presented a suite by a 17th-Century French harpsichordist, Gaston le Roux, that fully exploited the harpsichord's ability to sort out the different voices and produce a happy jangle, not to mention the sort of singing line the piano can only dream about.

Temple University's Paul Miller is a new member of the ensemble who plays the pardessus de viole and the viola d'amore— the equivalents of the violin and the viola in the older, somewhat more aristocratic viol family. (The viols like to remind the violins that they were entertaining kings while the violins were still roaming the streets churning out popular dances.)

Miller picked up the pardessus de viole for an 18th-Century French suite in which he combined his technical skills with a sure sense of the way everything fit together. He switched to the viola d'amore for a hard-driving Vivaldi concerto in which his instrument added an appropriately rustic sound to Vivaldi's suggestions of country dances, bustling hunts and flamboyant rural fiddling.

Not the retiring sort

The American Society of Ancient Instruments is America's oldest active period instrument organization. It was founded in the inauspicious year 1929 and this is its 80th annual three-concert spring festival. Until a few years ago, its music director was Florence Rosensweig, who started playing with the Society in the 1930s. Rosensweig has passed the director's job to a worthy successor, but she still sits in her accustomed place in the first chair, playing viol and violin, despite some medical disasters that would have ended the career of a less determined musician.

The second half ended with a lively quartet for guitar, violin, viola, and cello in which she took on the challenges created by a composer who was one of history's most accomplished bowmen: the redoubtable Niccolo Paganini himself. Rosensweig will join her colleagues again this coming Sunday (April 19) when the Society completes the 80th entry in a series that began when she was five years old.