Review of Cantiga!, Vocal and Instrumental Music from the Land of Three Faiths concert
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
By Richard Houdek, Special to The Eagle
Wednesday, December 06
GREAT BARRINGTON — Holiday concerts are a staple of entertainment this time of the year, and generally they involve such family-friendly lodestones as gaily lighted trees, pages of popular sing-a-long carols and merry Santa Clauses prancing into or out of sleighs.
Refreshingly, this was not the case in the latest program mounted by Close Encounters With Music, which attracted a large, responsive crowd over the weekend to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center.
"Cantiga! Vocal and Instrumental Music from the Land of Three Faiths" burrowed into some rarely performed musical literature from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Instead of the sweet frivolities of our contemporary holiday rites, these songs of the troubadours, from the courts, chapels and palaces of Andalusia and Castile and Sephardic and Ladino songs from Spain and Italy, explored some often serious matters, of life, death and survival.
Lyrics of the cantigas, or songs, follow the lives of those earlier day pilgrims, minstrels, gentry and merchants, in tales of their piety, deliverance, and, yes, revelry and lust as well.
The dramatic upheavals of the Muslim and Jewish civilizations attendant with the rise of Isabella and Ferdinand, known as the Catholic Kings; the Inquisition, the fierce battles to conquer cultures and the triumphs were imparted in these musical tales.
For the occasion, Yehuda Hanani, Close Encounters' founder and artistic director, gave members of his customary stable of musicians a holiday of their own and imported The Rose Ensemble, an adventurous group of singers from Minnesota who specialize in ancient music associated with world cultures and religion. The group is able to perform in about 30 languages, according its artistic director and founder, Jordan Sramek.
The troupe's musicians — 15 or so on this occasion — are a versatile group. Most of them are well-trained solo singers and choristers, some of them doubling, often tripling, on instruments exotic in our culture, such as the riqq, an Arabian tambourine; various drums, including the dumbek, frame drum and African drum, and stringed instruments, among them the vielle, rebec (a small harp), the vihuela da mano and the ud, an Arabic lute.
John Bitterman, a resonant bass, proved most persuasive in cantoring duties, and as a percussionist, as well. Mark Dietrich, an imposing figure who supplied a crusty bass voice to several songs, including "Rosa de beldad," a fervent paean to the Virgin Mary, also proved adept on the diminutive recorder. Fine solo turns also were offered by soprano Kim Sueoka and Eric Betthauser, a smooth counter-tenor who has developed a firm middle register, as well.
The evening's finely developed choral music ranged from chant and plainsong to multipart ballads and raucous eating and drinking songs by such early masters as Juan del Encina, Francisco Guerrero and Salamone Rossi. Articulation of the Spanish, Ladino, Gallician Portuguese and Hebrew texts was notably clear among the choristers.