The Lute Songbook. Lautten Compagney Berlin. Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 19802802402. Total time 1:09.
Sirens & Soldiers: Songs Without Words from the Italian Seicento. Concerto Scirocco, Giulia Genini. Arcana A565. Total time 1:09.
DIGITAL REVIEW – It takes more than two of something to make a trend, but a pair of new recordings of early-music ensembles playing instrumental arrangements of vocal works does seem like slightly more than a coincidence. Then again, Lautten Compagney Berlin’s The Lute Songbook and Concerto Scirocco’s Sirens & Soldiers: Songs Without Words arguably have more differences than similarities. Happily, each is an endeavor worth hearing.
The Lute Songbook is dedicated to the more than 40-year friendship between Lautten Compagney Berlin’s co-founders Wolfgang Katschner and Hans-Werner Apel. As music students in East Berlin, they started experimenting with John Dowland, William Byrd, and other lute music on classical guitar but eventually managed to find lutes and to connect with other players. They started the baroque ensemble Lautten Compagney in 1984 and began making records in the early 1990s.
The ensemble’s work has always been marked by a distinctive timbre and clarity, arising in part from its intelligent arrangements of the tunes it plays — and these are more “tunes” than “pieces”: This album of 69 minutes is jam-packed with 25 tracks. And while Katschner and Apel were way ahead of their time in their willingness to both play anything they loved and arrange anything without anachronistic concern for some precious, non-existent “correct” version, those qualities now make them especially well suited to today’s expanding concept of early music.
Not that even the broadest definition of “early” can explain the presence of a handful of 20th-century selections. But the more one considers it, the more logical those choices become. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Norwegian Wood” blends contrapuntally with “Greensleeves” like pastrami goes with rye; after all, Elvis Costello once referred to the Beatles’ oeuvre as “folk songs from Northern England.” And the repetitive motives of Philip Glass aren’t so far removed from, say, Vivaldi; Andreas Nachtsheim’s version for lutes and guitars of “Morning Passages” from Glass’ soundtrack for The Hours creates a mellow, undulating sea with a disturbing edge of harmonic threat, like a storm in the distance.
Even the less obvious concepts work: Percy Mayfield’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” in an arrangement for baroque instruments by Bo Wiget, cleverly intertwines the 1960 R&B classic with a passacaglia by 17th-century composer Francesco Cavalli. And perhaps most surprising is Babett Niclas’ arrangement of “Psyche” from a 2010 album by British trip hop band Massive Attack, transposed up a whole step from the original song for added tension.
Although those experiments draw focus, they make up only the small minority of the album, which is otherwise a delightful potpourri of early music, ranging from Guillaume DuFay’s “Ave maris stella” (early 15th century) to two numbers from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (late 17th century). But even the more expected repertoire is presented in a surprising way. Dowland’s “Clear or Cloudy” — sans lyrics like everything else in this collection — is a buoyant toe-tapper. Tarquinio Merulo’s 16th-century madrigal “No, no, ch’io non mi fido,” set over the descending line of a chaconne, explores every color of the 12-person ensemble (mostly strings), from the legato lines of bowed viols or traverso flute to the pointillistic plucking of lutes.
For Lautten Compagney, “authenticity” is a term that applies only in the sense of being true to themselves as creative artists, and there’s a lot to be said for that kind of exploration, allowing period instruments and early-music repertoire to once again be living things rather than museum pieces.
While not as wildly iconoclastic, Concerto Scirocco’s Sirens & Soldiers: Songs Without Words from the Italian Seicento also reinterprets vocal works as instrumental. This ensemble, too, seems to have the music’s continued and expanding vibrancy as its goal, but in this case with the blessing of the repertoire’s original era.
Director Giulia Genini took as her inspiration a passage by Silvestro Ganassi, a 16th-century pedagogue who wrote treatises on the recorder, the viola da gamba, and other musical topics. Ganassi compared instrumental arrangements of vocal music to a painter imitating nature in colors, just as “you can imitate the expression made by the human voice on a wind and stringed instrument.” This album proves the theory nicely.
Cavalli and Merulo, who make appearances on The Lute Songbook, also show up here, along with Marco Uccellini, Salamone Rossi, Johan Heinrich Schmelzer, and a half-dozen other composers who worked in Italy in the 17th century (the Italian term “Seicento,” despite literally meaning 600, refers to the 1600s when applied to years). Genini, on recorders and the double-reed dulcians, leads 10 fellow musicians, mostly brass and wind players plus continuo.
Part of this recording’s value is the way it showcases the wide range of sounds contained in the blown instruments. Scirocco is a band of experts, deftly navigating their sackbuts, cornettos, and dulcians with as much effortless dexterity as the violin and violone (an upright bass fiddle). Gone are the days of the galumphing Renaissance brass and excuses for its lack of expression and painful intonation.
The choices in instrumentation work well. Some are unusual, like centering the bass dulcian (brilliantly played by Genini) as solo instrument in Philipp Friedrich Bröddecker’s Sacra partitura No. 14. There are some truly beautiful moments as particular instruments play together, such as the three-voice canon from Cavalli’s Musica sacra, perfectly balanced for violin, violone, and tenor recorder with continuo.
The sackbuts have their chance to shine in Biagio Marini’s Canzon Decima a 6, Op. 8. It’s no surprise that Marini worked in Venice, where he would have been influenced by the part-writing of the uncle-and-nephew team of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. Another memorable sound is Genini’s soprano recorder, which flits its feathery way through Salamone’s Concerto sopra l’Aria de Ruggiero.
Producer Fabio Framba contributes mightily to the recording, capturing every nuance of color inherent in the instruments, from the sweet gut-string twang of the eight-course lute to the rich sigh of the chest organ. Concerto Scirocco has worked with Framba on previous recordings; hopefully, the relationship will continue.
Sirens & Soldiers may not include any Beatles or trip hop numbers, but that doesn’t keep it from being innovative in its own way.
