Concert Review of Celebremos el Niño: A Mexican Baroque Christmas
By Tom Strini
Milwaukee Journal Sentinal
December 14, 2008
Ensemble takes wide-ranging Baroque journey
Christmas music from the churches, homes and parties of Spanish colonial Mexico filled the ornate chapel of the St. Joseph's Center on Saturday evening, courtesy of the Rose Ensemble and Early Music Now.
Singer Jordan Sramek leads the Minneapolis-based ensemble of 13. This is a scholarly, period-conscious group, but they sing and play with a lusty ease that blows the dust off old music.
Much of the music, which dates from about 1610 to about 1710, follows normal European Baroque practice: A continuo group plays the bass and chords as voices harmonize and carry the melodies. Julie Elhard's viola da gamba carried the bass line, most of the time.
The Rose Ensemble passed on the usual keyboards and left it to Phillip Rukavina to play the continuo part on the vihuela da mano, a kind of guitar. Rukavina added lively ornamental lines to the harmonies, the jangly sound carried very well, and the color of the instrument added Spanish flavor.
More local color came from a tambourine and a djembe, a West African drum. It seems that the Guineans Spaniards brought to the New World were expected to bring their own music to Christmas celebrations. The djembe was brought to bear on a fascinating "Negrilla" by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla. This micro musical comedy includes an exchange between the padrone and the Guinean leader and nonsense syllables ("toombooocootoo") to mimic African percussion.
The "Negrilla" and "Tarara tarara," a duet for Sramek and baritone Tim O'Brien with Rukavina strumming vigorously behind them, were the wildest of the 14 selections on this "Mexican Baroque Christmas" program. The latter, by António de Salazar, is a first-person song that with my rattle and my bells and?.?.?.?declares "I am Anthony the Moor my tambourine, I shall go to Bethlehem to dance the Puerto Rico and the Cameroun."
Gutiérrez, the same composer who wrote the rollicking "Negrilla," also made formal, liturgical music for the church choir to sing. This program included the Gloria from one of his Masses and a religious motet.
But that motet incorporates foot-stomping, hip-swaying dance rhythms. The Rose Ensemble gave us a wide-ranging look of what appears to have been a surprisingly free-wheeling musical life in the Spanish New World.