Second Monday Music: Seicento Baroque Ensemble

In consort

By Chuck Smythe

The Seicento Baroque Ensemble, a semi-professional early-music group from Boulder, Colorado, recently ended its third season with a set of performances titled “Voices and Viols.”

    The viols were a consort of five Violas de Gamba, a cello-like instrument popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are held between the knees, are fretted, like a guitar, and are played with a bow whose horsehair is tensioned with a finger. String players tell me that this makes double stops (playing two strings at once) much easier than on modern instruments. It also creates a mellow, relatively dark sound, too soft for a large orchestra.
    I learned that the design also makes tuning fragile; a great deal of planning went into keeping the audience interested during the frequent re-tunings. The continuo (a bass accompaniment almost universal during the Baroque period) was provided by viols and by a wooden portative organ provided by William Adams. The organ was played by Michael Lui, a recent Colorado graduate originally from Hong Kong, and a musician of sometimes startling virtuosity. The voices, as usual, were a chorus of thirty-two, including yours truly, plus solo work by Amanda Balestrieri, soprano, Barjorie Bunday, alto, Steven Soph, tenor, and Adam Ewing, bass.

The composers were Samuel Scheidt, Johann Schein, and Heinrich Schütz, three Germans of the early Baroque.

I was slightly familiar only with Schütz, and was delighted to explore this work. It was varied, complex, and often exceptionally beautiful. It was also some of the most difficult work that Seicento has presented. Some of our challenges were learning to read scores in alto and tenor clefs (most of this music has never been transcribed to modern notation), learning to pronounce Latin as a seventeenth century German would have, and coping with missing or ambiguous measures, wild changes in tempo, chant-like sections, and other mysteries from the era before “common practice” overtook musical conventions.

The opener was Schütz’s “Herr, unser Herrscher.” It is scored for three choirs. One was taken by the viols, a second sometimes by the soloists, sometimes by dividing the chorus.
    Another of Schütz’s offerings was “Da pacem, Domine,” for double chorus. It alternated between an anthem, “Give us peace in our time,” and rambunctious choruses of “Long live Bavaria, long live Cologne, long live King Ferdinand, Caesar undefeated.” It was written for the Electoral Assembly of Muhlhausen, doubtless for political reasons. Schütz studied in Venice under Giovanni Gabrieli when young; out of this came a large set of Italian madrigals. I understand that he never wrote in this style again, and more the pity. We did “Ride la primavera” and “Tornate, o cari baci,” which are among the liveliest and most delightful madrigals I’ve ever sung.
    Other works included, for instance, Scheidt’s “Surrexit Christus Hodie” and Schein’s “Quem Vidistis Pastores,” two Christmas songs that would go wonderfully in the modern repertoire.
    Schütz’s “Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross” was the longest, as well as the most somber piece on the program. The viols were featured in a suite from Schein’s “Banchetto Musicale.” Schein wrote a great deal of secular music, from which we chose a paean to music, a drinking song, and a somewhat lewd chorus about a rooster and his chicken.
    It was, in the end, an extraordinary concert. I have rarely worked so hard to prepare for one.
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Copyright © 2014 by Chuck Smythe

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