Old-time music is wildly popular these days, but when it comes to deep roots, it has little on olde-tyme musick.
You have to go back a few hundred years to find the lively sounds the Baltimore Consort brings to modern audiences. The sextet will perform its arrangements of early music from England, Scotland, France, Italy and Spain at Sweet Briar College on Tuesday, Sept. 26.
Countertenor Jose Lemos will perform with the Baltimore Consort Sept. 26. More photosThe program, titled “Musick’s Silver Sound: Heavenly Harmony and Earthly Delight in the Renaissance,” will be held 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Chapel. Tickets go on sale Monday, Sept. 11.
A virtuoso ensemble featuring five instrumentalists and up-and-coming star countertenor Jose Lemos, the consort specializes in the courtly and popular music of the 16th to 18th centuries.
Viola da gamba player and consort spokesperson Mary Anne Ballard sets the scene in her notes on “Musick’s Silver Sound,” likening the performance to an Elizabethan-era “broken” or “mixed” consort. Combining diverse instruments — as opposed to a “whole” consort of like instruments — such ensembles performed the popular tunes of Shakespeare’s time.
The program is a “potpourri of dances and love songs from England, Scotland, France, Italy and Spain before and around 1600, and into the 17th century,” Ballard writes. “The variety of music here is characteristic of the original ‘broken consort’ — a vehicle for the recycling of favorite tunes, including many that were in currency internationally, in new arrangements.”
For 26 years the Consort has arranged Renaissance music for its repertoire, and — save for its young singer, Lemos —most of the original members are still in the group. “We joke that Jose was in diapers when we started,” Ballard said.
On stage their familiarity with each other — and the fun they’re having — telegraphs to audiences. “There’s a lot of interaction, a lot of back and forth between these contrasting sounds that gives us opportunities for playfulness,” Ballard said.
She notes there are a couple of “natural comedians” in the group. They also talk to audiences about the instruments and the music. Between the spontaneous humor and members’ rapport, listeners sometimes jump into the banter from the audience.
Besides Ballard on treble, tenor and bass viols, there’s Mark Cudek on cittern, Baroque guitar and bass viol; Larry Lipkis on bass viol, recorder and crumhorn; Ronn McFarlane on lute; and Mindy Rosenfeld on wooden flutes, whistle and crumhorn.
Instrumentally, the Baltimore Consort stays true to the formula that’s been successful for years, Ballard said. “[It] has a distinctive style and we are consistent.”
The group has added early Spanish music to its repertoire to allow Lemos, who is from Uruguay and Brazil, to sing in his native language.
Sweet Briar listeners can expect to hear songs about themes one expects to be timeless, such as love, as in “O Mistress Mine” with text as sung by “Clowne” in William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Others remind us that conflicts of today also are those of the past, as in “Levanta, Pascual, levanta.”
Translated to “Get up, Pascual, get up,” the 15th-century song exhorts the character Pascual to go to the city kingdom of Granada, Spain, to celebrate after word spreads that the Christians have retaken it from Moorish rule.
Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for seniors, $3 for students, and free for children younger than 12 and members of the SBC community. Contact (434) 381-6120 or e-mail reservations to
boxoffice@sbc.edu.
– By
Jennifer McManamay,
SBC staff writer
The Baltimore Consort will perform its arrangements of early music from Spain, England and other European countries on Sept. 26 in Memorial Chapel.
