Consorting with The Virgin Queen
a review by Gary Lemco
Having attended the Voices of Music concert Friday evening, December 15 at First United Methodist Church, Palo Alto, my initial impressions, beyond the sheer majesty of the Church edifice and ornate interior, inhabited by rows of poinsettias beneath the elongated cross, involved the relative, solemn chastity of the music at hand, much of it crafted by musicians who served Queen Elizabeth I and her court with conceits to her beauty and virtue, whether as Eliza or Oriana. The ensemble of five Elizabethan viols, recorder, and lute – Elizabth Reed, Wendy Gillespie, David H. Miller, Farley Pierce, William Skeen, viols; David Taylor, lute; Hanneke van Proosdij, recorder – enjoyed the fine vocal talent of soprano Molly Netter, whose plastic sense of nuance and maintenance of secure head tone ensured the integrity of the occasion. While the Church acoustic siphoned off some of Ms. Netter’s top range, her fine diction and control of ornaments, like trills and melismas, more than compensated in delivering the theme, much in the spirit of poet Edmund Spenser, that Elizabeth’s kingdom provided a “bower of blisse,” a haven for the arts and the proliferation of love in all its forms.
The concert proceeded by alternating instrumental pieces with vocal settings by composers living between 1543 (William Byrd) and 1634 (George Kirbye). As Eliza, the Queen received homage from, first, Robert Johnson (1583-1633), who spoke of Eliza’s earthly kingdom in celestial terms. William Byrd’s ecclesiastical settings, In Nomine a 5 and Ave Verum Corpus, set a staid, piously reverential tone in old, modal harmonies, especially pungent in its combination of plainchant and polyphony. After the intermission, we heard Byrd’s melancholy “My mind to me a kingdom is,” a Stoic sentiment of emotional restraint. In immediate contrast, Almaine, The honie-suckle of Anthony Holborne (1545-1602) retuned us to the earthy pleasures of the dance, his five selections cannily inserted at key intervals in the program.
Composer John Dowland (1563-1626) enjoyed three instances of his especial harmony, particularly his Lachrimae antiquae pavan, a Spanish dirge. His The Earl of Essex his galliard may well have insinuated Elizabeth’s brief favorite Robert Devereux in its upbeat eroticism, although this Earl of Essex fell to the headsman’s ax in 1601 after a failed coup. The gaiety of the dances, galliards, and rounds found an existential pause in music of Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). The silver swan and Walter Raleigh’s verse What is our life? respectively, lament humanity’s lack of intellect and life’s seeming absence of purpose. The chromatic melodic lines and consistent use of canonic entries in the compositions often became startling anticipatory of later musical developments we would hear in masters such as Beethoven in his late works.
George Kirbye (1564-1634) enjoyed pride of place with his madrigal With angel’s face and brightness, embracing the pastoral conceit of the Queen as Oriana, mistress of those nymphs and shepherds of pastoral idylls. The parallels with Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene of 1596 became immediately apparent. If the enchantment of the anonymous lyric “Greensleeves” (c. 1600) of the Ballet lute book from Ms. Netter failed to melt one’s heart, then Dowland’s Now. O now, I needs must part, the quintessential tribute to sadness, had to move all hearers, the wonderful example of what the Germans term Augenmusik, with the music a mirror of the text. Ms. Netter’s close, canny attention to detail had the words rising in volume or ornamented with grace notes to illustrate consistently the poetic sensibility.
The two encores (“Holiday Special No. 1 and No. 2”) intoned in high relief by Ms. Netter and the chest or consort of players included, first, the perennially charming 1944 “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, conceived for Judy Garland in the film Meet Me in St. Louis. The second, Michael Praetorius’ Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen, celebrates Mary, mother of Jesus, in radiant musical imagery. This concert of some 90 minutes treated not only Elizabeth but each auditor as a distinguished visitor, a royal personage.
The next Voices of Music concert, “An Evening in Vienna: Music by Schubert and Clara Schumann,” is scheduled for February 16-18, 2024. [wwwvoicesofmusic.org]
