Venice, with strings attached

by David Gordon Duke

ECHOES OF VENICE
17th Century Music for Church & Court
Knox United Church, Oct. 29

Kerrisdale’s Knox United Church on a rainy Friday evening is a long, long way from the splendour of 17th-century Venice. But an appreciative full house heard local period string ensemble La Cetra’s Echoes of Venice bring a considerable measure of baroque extravagance back to life.

The program concept invoked the magnificent repertoire written for St. Mark’s, Venice’s great but acoustically difficult church, where several generations of top composers explored site-specific music for groups of musicians stationed in different locations — 17th-century Surround Sound, if you will.

At Knox United the music was far more intimate — instrumental sonatas and interludes in the first half, dance music in the second — played by just a handful of strings with supporting keyboards, theorbo, or guitar. Echo concepts did feature prominently in many of the works, which exploited small-scale spatial novelties.

The first half, devoted to church-oriented works, had its ups and downs. Several solo organ Intonazione, minute preludes that should bristle with improvisatory sparks, were lacklustre. However, the opening Ecco sonata a 3 by Cesare set an impressive standard for the evening, featuring the remarkably pure and confident playing of Angela Malmberg echoed by two off-stage colleagues. Director Ray Nurse created three effective sets of smallish works by diverse composers, each with differing scorings and manifestations of the echo theme.

The second half focused on more straightforward music for courtly entertainments. The Ballo del Gran Duca by Cavalieri, and a particularly fine dance sequence from Il Ballo della Ingrate by Monteverdi, were tuneful, although the frequent rhythmic shifts in the Cavaliere were roughly negotiated on occasion. Merula’s Ciaccona and Uccellini’s Aria sopra Bergamasca are ground bass pieces — intricate melodic variations unfolding above stock bass lines. The latter enabled violinist Paul Luchkow to demonstrate his appropriately flamboyant style. The program ended with a further sequence of “airs and ancient dances,” utterly beguiling dance tunes for the full band.

La Cetra is still a relatively new group. Reservations remain about its match of instrumentalists and occasionally jarring idiosyncrasies of style or intonation, but Friday’s performance shows that it is beginning to gel and find its collective voice. Echoes of Venice manifested real promise. With commitment (and, one hopes, ongoing financial and artistic support), La Cetra could fulfill its potential and become an ensemble of significance.

Vancouver Sun,
1 Nov. 2004

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