Saturday night saw the debuts of two old-and-new players on Seattle’s music scene: a new old hall, visited by a contemporary voice for early music.
The First United Methodist Church at Fifth and Marion was built in 1907, serving the community there until it moved in 2008-09 to Belltown. Now the old church, having escaped demolition thanks to enlightened developer Kevin Daniels, has reopened its sanctuary as a concert venue: Daniels Recital Hall.
Saturday saw its first use for an early music performance, coming full circle from the 1980s and early ’90s when this was where the Early Music Guild presented its regular concert series.
Many of the those same concertgoers were on hand to hear the first in a new series from Pacific MusicWorks. Led by lutenist Stephen Stubbs, Pacific MusicWorks intends to bring early instruments and voices together for its performances, and also to incorporate later music up to the present day where it fits the premise of the concert. (Pacific MusicWorks’ next concert will be a theatrical staging of Carissimi’s Prophets at St. James Cathedral, January 13-14.)
Canticum Canticorum, The Song of Songs, included 17th-century settings of incomparable poetry from the Song of Solomon but with a couple of works each from the 16th and from the 20th (Willan and Walton), sung by Canada’s Les Voix Baroques with a group of mostly Seattle-based instrumentalists.
Hearing these works by de Lassus, Schuetz, Monteverdi, Buxtehude, Mazzocchi, Johann Christoph Bach (an older cousin of Johann Sebastian), Charpentier, and Purcell from a few hundred years ago brings the realization that while the words could be extraordinarily descriptive love poetry, in a carnal sense, in these settings, it is more about a pure, religious passion. The music is not erotic at all.
Only in Schuetz’ Adjuro vos Filia Jerusalem–“…If ye find my beloved, …tell him That I am sick of love,” which was more emotional–and then in Monteverdi’s Nigra Sum, where there was more of a sense of yearning and anticipation, did a little human passion shine through.
The music is beautiful, the words even more, but in general the performance by this stellar group didn’t really live up to expectation. Words were only partly audible, expressivity didn’t come across. I felt I should have been carried away by the performance and I wasn’t. Perhaps they were having an off night, or perhaps it was the hall itself.
The old sanctuary of Daniels Hall is an arched, soaring space admirable for a concert hall, with good lighting, good sight lines, about 1500 seats (and easy parking!). No one is too far from the stage, which will be at least doubled in size
At the moment, the stage, the steps and the auditorium floor are carpeted, and I believe this will be taken out.
The audience included a who’s who of Seattle’s top early musicians and presenters. The opinions of the hall amongst a half dozen of them them varied from a lack of vocal blending, too immediate an arrival of sound with no arcing, no bloom, and an inability to hear clearly; but also a sense that we have to wait until the hall’s renovation is complete before passing further judgement, and also that we, as audience, have to get used to the hall as well. Though I had no chance to ask the musicians, it seemed that they had some difficulty hearing each other, particularly the two groups of players on opposite sides of the stage.
It’s to be hoped that Les Voix Baroques will return so that we may hear them again, perhaps when the hall is finished. Singers Shannon Mercer, Meg Bragle, Jacques-Olivier Chartier, Sumner Thompson, and Douglas Williams–joined here by Clara Rottsolk replacing an indisposed Catherine Webster–were accompanied by violinists Tekla Cunningham and Emma McGrath, violist Laurel Wells, viola da gambist Margaret Little, harpist Maxine Eilander, and organist Joseph Adam, with Stubbs directing from his lutenist chair.
