October 5, 2004
Early music enchantment and an hour of interesting listening
By Peter Jacobi, Herald-Times Reviewer
To follow top of the charts operatic and orchestral fare ("La Boheme" and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony) in a matter of days with a concert featuring the virtually unknown (16th century Guatemalan church music) and another with some rarely performed 20th-century chamber music: Well, that's one of the beauties of Bloomington.
Indeed, such, and more, was this reviewer's rewarding journey during the week just past, and I know there were others like me. We're awfully lucky.
The church music, found in manuscripts dating to the years around 1582 and now housed in the Lilly Library, was brought to life in performance Saturday evening by Ensemble Lipzodes, a group formed by present and former students in Indiana University's Early Music Institute. The musicians used the concert, given in Trinity Episcopal Church and sponsored by the Bloomington Early music Festival, as a final warm-up to the finals of an Early Music America Competition being held this week in New York City. Ensemble Lipzodes is one of six aggregations invited to the event.
The musicians seemed to be ready for their test, managing like conjurers to take a listener back to that other time in another place and making him feel both the reverence and the joy that this music most likely expressed for worshippers who first heard it, native worshippers who were being wooed to Christianity. The lively instrumental introductions and bridges balanced the more serious chanting quality of sung praises and must have made vespers and the mass more comfortable and acceptable experiences for the newcomers in attendance.
Wolodymyr Smishkewych's pliable tenor was at the heart of the chanting. He was ably joined wherever a choral dimension was called for by sopranos Teresa Herold and Amanda Sidebottom and baritone Matthew Leese. As instrumental foundation, the program had the drumming of Smishkewych and — on shawms, dulcians and recorders — the disciplined and informed musicianship of Juan Carlos Arango, C. Keith Collins, Anna Marsh and Kathryn Montoya.
There was enchantment to their music making, and one sensed also that what one heard was as honest a representation of this music as could be hoped for, considering the sparseness of notation and guidance that such old manuscripts offer. What resulted turned into a most moving experience.
Sundays at Auer
One can by now consider Francis Poulenc's 1958 Sonata for Flute and Piano an accepted and recognizable item in the chamber music repertoire, but what else Sunday's audience in Auer Hall heard is not nearly so well known: works by the French Andre Jolivet, the Czech Bohuslav Martinu and the Russian Aram Khachaturian.
Together, the four compositions made for an interesting afternoon hour of listening, and they certainly gave the participating musicians sufficient challenges, all met.
The most active performer of the occasion was flutist Kathryn Lukas, on stage not only for the both haunting and playful Poulenc but for Jolivet's more harmonically strident yet also inviting Sonatine for Flute and Clarinet, written in 1961, and a flooded-with-notes 1945 Sonata No. 1 for Flute and Piano by Martinu. Lukas had a trio of fine collaborators: pianist Sung-Mi Im for the Poulenc, clarinetist Howard Klug for the Jolivet, and pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer for the Martinu.
The adventurous Lukas, so often heard in avant garde music that stresses technique and shuns beauty of sound, had an extended opportunity during this concert to showcase tonal clarity and sumptuousness. And that she certainly did; she is, after all, a consummate flutist. Sunday's pieces made her shine.
The always-excellent Howard Klug returned to the stage for the program-concluding Trio by Khachaturian. His admirable collaborators were pianist Im and violinist Ik-Hwan Bae. All three seemed to revel in music one would not ascribe to Khachaturian, so much better known for his blatant, bombastic, even kitschy ballet scores like "Gayane" and "Spartacus." The Trio, written in 1932 when the composer was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, is subtle and yet intense, imbued with melancholy and enriched by lyricism. The performers treated it with tender respect.
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Last Updated:
10/12/2004
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