by Marvin J. Ward

Deerfield, MA, 21 October 2007.  Arcadia Players presented the Five College Consort of Viols in a program of music by Bach, Purcell, Charpentier, and Muffat in the Caswell Library of Deerfield Academy here yesterday evening as a part of the school’s (founded in 1797) Parents Weekend.

The heyday of viols (or violas da gamba) was in the 2nd half of the 17th century; they were replaced by the violin family as the 18th progressed because the latter were more virtuosic and able to be better heard in larger concert venues.  Viols have gut strings, 5 or 6 depending on their French or Italian nationality, frets like guitars, and are tuned in 4ths rather than 5ths.  The Consort consisted of four players on bass, tenor, alto and treble instruments, Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Meg Pash, Alice Robbins, and Robert Eisenstein respectively.  The Consort is capable of deploying a full complement of six, with performers on the violone, the family’s double bass equivalent, and a yet smaller, high treble.  Not many places have regularly performing Viol Consorts, or can even field one.

The concert opened with an “Ouverture” by French-born German, Georg Muffat.  A 17th century French overture was generally composed for the beginning of an event rather than an opera, and followed a standard pattern of slow-fast-slow, with the central movement containing a fugue.  This charming one was followed by Contrapuncti I, IV, & VI, the latter “in stylo francese,” from J.S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue, S. 1080 (1740s).  This work was most likely composed for a keyboard instrument, either harpsichord or organ, and clearly has a didactic use, but it lends itself well to transcription/adaptation for the viol consort.  Its 13 completed Contrapuncti are all fugues under this other pseudo-Latin word for “counterpoint” that Bach borrowed from his hero Dietrich Buxtehude, who apparently coined the term.  (The work also contains 4 canons.)

Three delightful and impressive Fantazias, in c, d, and G (ca. 1680), by Henry Purcell followed these, and the Contrapunctus XI from the Bach work concluded the first half.  The second half opened with the Concert pour quatre parties de violes of Marc-Antoine Charpentier.  A French “Concert” is what we would today call a Suite, a set of dances in varying rhythms.  This 6-movement one was very pleasant, among his more important independent (i.e., not associated with a Molière play) instrumental works.  The concluding set from the Bach featured the Contrapuncti XII & XIII followed by the Fuga a 3 Soggetti, the final piece in the autograph manuscript that was incomplete when Bach died in 1750.  The music stopped abruptly at the last original note, the musicians having decided not to play any of the completions composed by others.

The variety in tonal ranges offered by the set of instruments and their overall breadth gave a very different feel to the Bach pieces than one has when they are performed on a keyboard.  The pleasant sound has some resemblance to that of a vocal quartet, as Dr. Walter Denny of the UMass Department of Art History, and a tenor, pointed out in his informative and entertaining pre-concert talk about the instruments.  Detailed written program notes by Eisenstein helped the audience know the pieces and their composers as well.  The huge risk that a program of works like these, so similar to each other in style and form, performed by this ensemble of instruments, all with a very distinct family resemblance, presents is that of serious monotony.   The Consort’s fine playing and the skillful arrangement of the works chosen gave them life, if not its spice.  The 100+ listeners in the room would, if anything, have enjoyed hearing some more.