Who Needs Carnegie Hall? Early Music in a Greenwich Village Club
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
Published: October 2, 2009
What is early music? Literally, it is a repertory, comprising music from — take your pick — the 18th century and before? The 19th and before? By extension, the early-music movement came to include a philosophy of performance that flourished in the 20th century as musicians increasingly tried to replicate the sounds and styles of particular eras.
Now, at least in New York, early music has also become a scene. The two-year-old Gotham Early Music Scene lived up to its name this week with the GEMS Project, a series of three programs at Le Poisson Rouge, the trendy Greenwich Village club that is taking the classical music world by storm.
By any definition, early music is wildly diverse. The project’s format, developed in previous concerts, presented three groups per evening, and the first program, on Wednesday, was diverse perhaps to a fault.
Uncommon Temperament, a group of young Baroque performers, opened with works of Handel: a trio sonata and a soprano version of the cantata “Mi Palpita il Cor,” sung by Ariadne Greif.
The performances were accomplished and winning, and Ms. Greif made a game attempt to turn the cantata, a young man’s expression of coronary twitter in the face of budding love, into something mildly dramatic. Reclining in a chair, she enacted the work as a psychiatric session: alas, a one-line joke that without real character development wore thin long before she scribbled the check at the end.
East of the River, another group led by the recorder virtuosos Nina Stern and Daphna Mor, brought a spirit from east of East River, Brooklyn, to music more or less east of the Danube, as Ms. Stern suggested in preperformance remarks. The listing of Armenian, Macedonian, Italian, Bulgarian and Greek tunes suggested greater variety than emerged from the stage, where an air of modern-day klezmer seemed an insistent presence.
The Clarion Music Society looked to be an alien presence in this setting, taking the stage in concert garb to present music from the court of Catherine the Great. This is a theme, mixing Western European influences and indigenous composition in St. Petersburg, that could barely be suggested in a third of a concert. Ilya Poletaev gave a charming performance of a harpsichord sonata by Baldassare Galuppi. A two-movement string quartet by Anton Ferdinand Titz and arias from operas by Yevstigney Fomin and Bortniansky made little impression, bereft of context.
Except that provided in an overlong spoken introduction by Clarion’s music director, Steven Fox. In general, the talk, guided by Gotham’s executive director, Gene Murrow, proved awkward, finding little middle ground between forced banter and scholarly disquisition.
Mr. Murrow claimed in initial remarks to have found “the perfect place” for early music that was performed among “friends eating and drinking,” and you could live with the occasional crashes of plates. The noise from the ventilation system and the often unsubtle miking represented more serious compromises.
And if catchall programs are to be any wave of the future, a way must be found to make disparate elements speak to one another rather than merely coexist.
James Oesterreich - The New York Times
(Oct 3, 2009)