Review: Apollo's Fire: 'Come to the River'

What an endlessly inventive group is Apollo's Fire! Their current offering, "Come to the River," billed as "An Early American Gathering," combines drama, personal recollection, American musical and religious history, and a corncrib full of music. Baroque meets bluegrass, and gospel, and shaped-note, and Celtic, and . . . .

Somewhat changed from last year's sell-out version, this is a show that clearly delighted all ages (kids, oldsters, and -- gasp!-- even teenagers). At the matinee at Huntington Playhouse, the revival gathering may not have converted any souls, though Lake Erie's beaches were at hand for a baptism if it had been needed, but it won a bunch of hearts, judging from the foot-tapping, hand-clapping, and vigorous audience sing-along at the end.

Jeannette Sorrell's stamp, as with all of Apollo's Fire, is unmistakable here. It's she who frames the collection of fiddle-tunes, gospel songs, ballads, and other surprises around her own experiences as a teenager playing piano for a revival church in the Shenandoah Valley. Being an accomplished historian of music, as well as performer and impresario, Sorrell has researched the roots of the tradition in Appalachian barn dances, frontier shoot-em-up songs, shaped-note hymns, and those incomparable American melancholic tunes like "Wayfaring Stranger" and "What Wondrous Love."

This being Apollo's Fire, what might be called corny is also highly accomplished. The artfulness of the performances is evident even while the performers and the audience are having great fun. Watching the stunning cellist René Schiffer stagger to the ground as the two-timing Wild Bill Jones is a hoot; it's quite another thing, though, to hear Schiffer play his own variations on "Old Virginny," as a reflection on Scott Mello's heart-rending rendition of the beautiful sad ballad.

The barn dances that begin the show are simply wonderful: varied, expressive, full of the rhythmic energy we have come to love in Apollo's Fire performances. Tina Bergmann plays the dulcimer with a combination of the early American and the new Celtic sound; baritone Paul Shipper -- also a wonderful "preacher" -- does a stunning rendition of a 1609 English lullaby; flutist Kathie Stewart leads a set of traditional Irish dances with a melancholy sound full of the Emerald Isle.

Even the harpsichord -- not unknown in early America -- plays its part in a set of dances from New England and Ireland; here, as in many of the sets, the soloist (Sorrell) claims the stage for a solo and then subtly hands off the energy to others who join her. The eventual ensemble playing, with running bass lines, obbligato roulades on top, and a relentless percussive energy, made up for the fact that we couldn't actually get up and dance in the aisles.

Sopranos Sandra Simon gave us a number of songs; one of the most memorable was her "Fox on a Chilly Night," accompanied only by Sorrell on the bodhran, sung with such articulation and delivery that no one needed the printed text to understand what the story was. She was joined by tenor Scott Mello and soprano Abigail Haynes Lennox in a gripping lullaby, "Nobody but the Baby," from a field recording by the great folkmusic collector Alan Lomax. Fiddler Rachel Jones was collaborator with Lennox in a very moving "Wayfaring Stranger."

Apollo's Fire has taught us in their baroque concerts how corporeal baroque music was. In this program, the barn dances and fiddle tunes were given real "body" by the very accomplished body-percussion artist Matthew Olwell, whose fast-moving feet, hands, chest, arms, and even mouth, were his tympani and his marimba.

A great moment in the second half, which centers on a revival meeting, was Apollo's rendition of "Hold On," the great civil rights gospel song that Mahalia Jackson and Pete Seeger sang. Sorrell and Schiffer let loose with a bass line that made us think there might be an electric guitar in the wings.

The series of shaped-note hymns in the second half was the least convincing part of the program; the singers seemed a little glued to their part-books, with this unfamiliar and fascinating style. Even so, I loved hearing these modal harmonies, and the set provided a welcome reflective period in an otherwise high-energy afternoon.

Bravo to the group for finding such varied venues, and for traveling around Northeast Ohio to bring this music near to us. And bravo for having the spectacular and vivacious juggler Aaron Bonk (whose card lists him as "Object Manipulation Specialist") on hand to greet us and to give a show at intermission.

(performance June 20, 2010; review published in ClevelandClassical.com)

Italy: a complex space

The Piazza San Marco, at the center of Venice, is a complicated and wonderful space: history built on history; structures gilded and decorated; religious and civic and hedonistic functions competing for space in this compressed city space.

One edge, to the right on this picture of the basilica of San Marco, struck me as especially complex. It is called the "piazzetta," the little piazza, and it stretches from the basilica to the waterfront in the long direction, and from the Palace of the Doges (the dukes) to the Biblioteca (library) Nazionale Marciana on the short side.

Here's where travelers to Venice in old times would have gotten out of their galleys and entered the city. They would have seen on their right the Duke's Palace (here on the left of the picture) -- a long marbled and pillared building speaking worlds about the power of the republic and its oligarchy.

Then at the end of the square, they would have seen the side of the basilica: again, covered in marble, laden with the spoils of Constantinople, a brilliant facade to the voluminous chiaroscuro of gleaming and dark inside.

And on their left as they made their way to the basilica, the Renaissance arcades of what is now the library -- and was even then, a storehouse of Greek and Latin humanism. (see my former posts on this blog)

What I wonder, is whether the architects of this space imagined the other component to this mix of civic, religious, scholarly treasures? That is, the entertainment that fills it today -- and has at least since the 18th century. We know that because Canaletto's sparkling pictures show us people having a great time in this tourist town, which has been a tourist town longer than we can imagine.

After hearing mass and choral music in San Marco, we came out to the square, and what? brilliance after darkness, joviality after solemnity, schmaltz after Gounod's sanctus and Franck's Panis angelicus:

Italy: an old library

The library I was in yesterday -- see the previous blog -- was the working end of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice -- the National Library of St. Mark. It's in the old mint, called the Zecca.

Today we went to the showy end of the same library. Here's a library to beat all libraries.

It was the poet Petrarch who had the idea of a library for Venice, in 1362.

The library got started a century later, when the humanist Cardinal Bessarion (they had humanists in the Roman Catholic church then) donated a thousand "codexes" -- or books in MS. -- and some "incunabula" -- early printed books to the city of Venice. These included the main sources of Homer's poems for the modern world.

About another century passed and the Republic of Venice built this gorgeous library to house the books. Three hundred years later, or so, Napoleon ended the Republic and annexed the library to his new palace, which blocked off the end of the Piazza San Marco and generally annoyed the citizens no end.

The library is decorated with paintings around the walls and ceilings, of course. This is a movie with a 360 degree view.

The decoration includes about a dozen pictures of philosophers -- some by Tintoretto, others by lesser artists. They are burly, strong men, mostly, men whose strong thinking seems to have gone into their bodies as well. (I can't pull a picture in here, but try clicking here for Tintoretto's Aristotle).

These scholars and scientists are uncomfortably crammed into niches, torturously turning to get themselves into the available space. They are focused on books, thoughts, geometries, inward. Great figures for a library in the Renaissance: think about the world, they say, in the broadest possible way; but do it in your body, in the space that's given to you. It's not going to be easy.

Italy: old books

This morning, I walked down to San Marco, in Venice. By ten, the crowds were just starting to gather, the families speaking all kinds of languages, laughing, listening to the bands at the expensive cafes. I love watching the crowds in Venice.

But today, instead, I turned in by one of the cafes to go into the national library in Venice. I am working on the poems of Guarini, a poet from about 1600. I had found that the library had three editions of his poems, two of which I hadn't seen, so I went to look at these. Happy sounds filtered in from the cafes and the crowds as I worked with these old books.

One thing it taught me was that Guarini was pretty popular. In one year alone, there were at least five reprintings of his poems -- and that in a day when every reprinting meant laborious type-setting and expensive paper. The fifth, interestingly, was a little pocket-size edition that told me he wasn't just a coffee-table poet.

The first edition, though, was pretty fancy: bound in soft calf leather, with a fancy title-page like this one (here's me in the library with this book). Most luxurious of all, it gave a full page to each poem, some of them only seven lines long. The Venetians knew how to do things right, even then.

Guarini was popular with ordinary readers, but also with composers, which Venice abounded with. Those days, most music was sung music. Composers looked for texts that were expressive and gave them a chance to put in lots of contrasts: I'm in love/I hate being in love; I'm so happy/I bet I won't be happy very long; she's so cool/she's too cool to me.

The composers loved Guarini's poems. So I thought I would look at some of their work. I called up three collections of "madrigals" -- each with about 15 songs in them, one by one Gesualdo, and two by Monteverdi, who had been music director right across the piazza from where I was, in the basilica of St. Mark. (Here's Monteverdi)

In those days, you bought music in parts; that is, you saw only your own part; there was likely no "score," no collected representation of all the parts together. So, that's what I saw too, only parts. The Gesualdo only had two of the five parts, the others were missing. These were thin little books, that would have sat in front of a singer, each sitting around a big table.

One of the Monteverdi collections was well used. Someone, in pen, in a 17th-century handwriting, had made some notes. He or she was interested in where the texts were from, so there were notes on the poets. Also, the music had been performed; there were corrections to some of the wrong notes. One of them was especially interesting -- a little piece of paper, about an inch long, floating in the tenor part, with a music staff, four notes, and some words of text. I couldn't figure out where it had originally gone, but surely it was exactly what I do now when something's wrong and I want a readable part -- I write it out corrected and paste it over the wrong notes. Only the paste hadn't lasted four hundred years.

I didn't really need to look at these first editions of music: these are famous pieces, and they've been edited in modern, scholarly editions and I can see them in Oberlin. But I'm glad I did. It let me touch the work of these Venetians as that work had first seen the light of day, held by people who used them then.