Apollo's Fire and guests stoke the embers of Elizabethan lute music and songs to 'Drive the Cold Winter Away' (review)
Lutenist Ronn McFarlane joined soprano Meredith Hall and Apollo's Fire and friends for the ensemble's annual Fireside Concerts last week, with two performances at Rockefeller's restaurant in Cleveland Heights.
By Special to The Plain Dealer
January 27, 2014
By Mark Satola
Rockefeller's restaurant in Cleveland Heights was transformed from its usual culinary role into an old English tavern for two nights last week when Apollo’s Fire presented two of its annual Fireside Concerts there, with soprano Meredith Hall, lutenist Ronn McFarlane and friends in a program of Elizabethan English lute songs and duets called (quixotically, one must admit) “Drive the Cold Winter Away.”
While the musicians also played at other ecclesiastical venues around town, Rockefeller's proved the most evocative setting, with its vaulted arches, cast-iron chandeliers and paneled oak ceiling.
Add in the huge fireplace that John D. Rockefeller for some reason included in the design of what was then a bank – with its quaint couplet about saving money carved into the stone mantel and a pyramid of crackling logs within – and the stage was fairly well set.
Did we mention the food and drink? That was there, too, a spread of hors d’oeuvres and free-flowing spirits from the bar that completed the evening's transformation. All that remained to bring in were the performers, who took the stage nearly 15 minutes late, thanks to the audience’s understandable reluctance to abandon the festive party mood and take their seats, there to sit up straight, listen attentively and generally behave themselves.
Joining Hall and McFarlane were longtime Apollo’s Fire stalwarts Kathie Stewart on the dove-voiced wooden traverse flute and, on lute and theorbo, William Simms.
Hall and company introduced the theme of the evening with Thomas Campion’s “Now Winter Nights Enlarge,” which proposes that diversions such as music and love, however sportive they might prove, are effective in passing the long winter nights.
Hall was in good voice, though there were some occasional rough edges to her usual crystalline timbre, perhaps due to the dryness of the heated indoor air; her not-infrequent recourse to bottled water during the performance suggested as much.
There was a definite undercurrent of melancholy in the lengthy program. John Dowland, famous as a composer given to the darkest of moods even when his melodies veer toward the cheerful, was well-represented with a number of songs, including the famously doleful “Flow My Tears,” a reworking with words of his biggest instrumental hit, the “Lachrymae Pavan.”
Similarly, the anonymous “Robin Is to the Greenwood Gone,” a young girl's lament on the death of her beloved, and the sepulchral “Fortune My Foe” brought home the darkness that hovered over many of the selections.
Other songs, however, allowed a pale winter sun to break through, including “Callinoe,” “The Old Year Now Away is Fled” and “Drive the Cold Winter Away.”
The instrumental pieces – lute duets by Dowland, John Johnson, Francis Cutting, the peculiarly named Godfrey Finger and others – were uniformly sunny, too.
Dowland’s “My Lord Chamberlain’s Galliard,” described by the composer as “An invention for two to play upon one lute,” provided a moment of real comedy as McFarlane and Simms doubled up on a single instrument, McFarlane hovering over and behind Simms as they navigated the close quarters of the lute’s short but broad neck.
The high point of the evening was certainly Henry Purcell’s “If Music Be the Food of Love,” which showed why Purcell was his country’s greatest composer up to that point. Hall’s near-operatic rendition brought a cataract of applause and at least half a dozen “bravas.”
If one must quibble at all about the program, it might be that it lacked a narrative structure or more information about who these long-past composers and musicians were, and what made them exceptional. But it was, after all, an entertainment, not a seminar, and in that sense, “Drive the Cold Winter Away” was wholly successful.
Satola is a freelance writer in Shaker Heights who works as an announcer at WCLV FM/104.9.
