virtual turntable

And despite the fact that this washes out of the code as a Tim Eriksen album, what they mean is Tim Eriksen AND ELIZA CARTHY.

virtual turntable

sundry items

So the final free audio-only webcast from the Met is I Puritani this Tuesday, April 29 at 7:30 ET here. That's Peretyatko, Brownlee, Kwiecien, Pertusi.

Arte has this series about Juilliard starting tomorrow. The excerpts they've posted are US-accessible, so maybe the rest of it will be as well, who knows.

BBC 3 Composer of the Week was Handel in London all week long, so you know that means lots of opera bits. These episodes tap out soon on iPlayer, so jump in quick if you wish to begin at the beginning.

Back in February Sting tried out material from The Last Ship, his theater piece about the (demise of the) shipbuilding industry in the north of England, at the Public Theater in NYC, and PBS has posted up the video. The cranks in the Trad Office at the Noise Ministry say Haven't there been songs on that topic around since forever and didn't Louis Killen pretty much sing them all? But really this is all about Kathryn Tickell there in the wayback lending the smallpipes and fiddle action.

International Incident at the Court of King Festus

The Special Envoy reports: 

I went to get my viol...Alas...King Festus does not like the tenor viol...so he had it disappeared...and has turned its case into a condo.

Sunday morning post from the Ministry of Noise

first tune's a killer

Woes in the Dead of Night: Atalante @ BEMF, 6/13/13

The ensemble Atalante was formed by lironist Erin Headley as part of a life-long exploration of the lirone and its repertoire. The lirone, one could be forgiven for not knowing, is a stringed instrument in the cello or bass gamba vein, only with a big flat headstock and a much wider fretboard to accommodate its many more strings.  The instrument had about a 200 year heyday, and was particularly popular among 17th century Italian composers following in the footsteps of Monteverdi. Several of these were based in Rome -- Rossi, Marazzoli, et al. -- and it is around their work that Atalante's first album, Lamentarium, is focused.

And it was with a program centered around Lamentarium that Atalante made its BEMF debut on Thursday night of the festival at Boston's Emmanuel Church, in an exploration of the baroque lament as form. On this night -- it was the late slot at 11pm -- the ensemble consisted of singers Theodora Baka (mezzo) and Nadine Balbeisi (soprano), Siobhan Armstrong's triple harp, Elizabeth Kenny on chitarrone, and Kristian Bezuidenhout on harpsichord and organ. Erin Headley should of course have been there, but sadly had suffered a mishap earlier in the week and was placed on the dl (as they say in baseball) for the remainder of the festival. Bass gambist David Morris was enlisted to fill her place, and although the lirone's particular resonances were surely missed, the glass half full was that at this festival (and perhaps only at this one) such a fine replacement, let alone any at all, could be improvised on short notice.

Being something of a Gesamtkunstwerk in and of itself, the ensemble performed the material semi-staged, with singers in costume. Baka and Balbeisi wore 17th century-style satin gowns purposely reminiscent of women in Caravaggio paintings, and accessorized according to character: a mirror for the aging Helen, a cup/urn for Artemisia, period-specific notion of oriental headgear for the bereft  Zaida. (Having ornately-carved ecclesiastical furniture on hand was an additional bonus.) The singers entered black-hooded, and began with Misereris omnium, Domine, part of a larger work by Domenico Mazzocchi, which set the tone at appropriately goth and nicely displayed the singers' individually lovely and well-matched voices. In the works that followed, whether solo or two-hander with both character and narration, Baka's approach proved more dramatic while Balbeisi's was more rhetorical -- though this could have had something to do with the characters they were portraying. Baka had Artemisia, after all, and a lengthy externalized consideration of drinking one's beloved's ashes...well...let's just say that's a journey.

Vocal works were interspersed with instrumentals. The playing on these seemed tight despite the roster change, and the standout, for me, was Luigi Rossi's Passacaglia dell' Seigneur Louigi, which opens the Lamentarium album as a lirone showcase but here featured Armstrong's triple harp and Bezuidenhout's harpsichord. If that was also an improvised fix, then it was beautifully done.

Some of the pieces on the program, it seems, have yet to be recorded, so we'll hope for another CD release down the line, and for Atalante's return at BEMF 2015.

echt versus ersatz

Baritone Christopher Maltman interviews Eliza Carthy, Georgina Boyes, Tim Healey, Julius Drake and Thomas Allen about why opera singers singing traditional songs in recital puts the folkies in a twist. Myself included, about 75% of the time, simply because opera singers seem to have a knack for letting their training get in the way of the material. I sit quietly in the audience and cast my eyes heavenward. There are exceptions, of course, and Thomas Allen is one of them. Bryn Terfel, also.

One of the interesting questions raised by Georgina Boyes is one of style. She's right, an opera singer who trills an 'r' and hyper-enunciates in a traditional song (with certain exceptions) sounds plain weird. I am reminded of a video I saw once where a vocal coach was teaching tenor Jerry Hadley how not to sing a Broadway showtune as if it were something out of a Handel oratorio. If an opera singer can grasp that showtunes are not sung like opera arias, then it should be even plainer that trad songs are not sung like opera arias. On the other hand, I wouldn't say that rule holds true for a situation where a composer like Britten or Grainger has made an Arrangement with a capital A. And on the other hand of that, that's probably why I don't find their versions all that interesting.

And version is the key word, because the bottom line is it's traditional music, by definition it survives by people putting their hands and voices to it, in whatever fashion and with whatever aesthetic result. Not to mention the fact that traditional music has a long history of appropriation itself. Consider the borderland of Pills to Purge Melancholy, or certain features of Scottish fiddle tunes, or any O'Carolan tune you'd care to name. Meanwhile, in the other direction, there are still loads of musos out there following in the Fairport/Steeleye Span tradition of rocking out The English & Scottish Popular Ballads. (Or the Warner Collection, as the case may be.) Everybody's lived so far.


More on this, possibly, after dinner on Wednesday, if the right people turn up. But meantime here's all of Eliza Carthy & the Ratcatchers' version of The Gallant Hussar, which is pretty spiff and raises a few questions of its own about performativity (if there is such a word) and the nature of audience.

Wednesday night hardingfele from the Ministry of Noise

Monday night hardingfele from the Ministry of Noise