Ellen Hargis. Photo courtesy of bernardgordillo.com
Gallery Concerts has been around in Seattle for 25 years, getting its name from their early days when the concerts were performed in various art galleries in and near Pioneer Square. Never a big organization, it has steadfastly worked with performance practice ideals and high quality performers, many local, performing Baroque music or, equally often, romantic or classical works, using instruments of the period.
Saturday night, at Queen Anne Christian Church, it gave us our first taste this year, live rather than getting it canned on TV, radio or commercial, of Christmas music. Titled A Baroque Christmas, it included selections from the 15th to 18th centuries, sung by soprano Ellen Hargis and played by violinist Carla Moore, viola da gamba player John Dornenburg and harpsichordist Jillon Stoppels Dupree.
The white-haired Hargis is the third singer I have heard this year now in their senior years, with an illustrious career still continuing and a voice showing no signs of age. (The others are opera divas Joyce Castle and Rosalind Plowright.)
Her fine, strong soprano is pure with little vibrato as she sings in the style of those past centuries, but her years of experience show in her artistry of phrasing and expression, her clear words and compelling presence.
The program included French, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian and German carols, cantata recitatives, arias, and more, with instrumental works interspersed with Hargis’s singing.
Most fascinating of the works she sang was Italian Tarquinius Merula’s “Canzonetta Spirituale sopra la ninna nanna.” There were no program notes, but Hargis explained before singing this that Christmas songs for women of the era were either lullabies or laments delineating madness, grief, denial, and acceptance, or used a ground base; that is, the lowest instrumental notes being a repeated accompaniment throughout. This canzonetta, she said, joined all three together, and with the excellent translation she gave us, we could hear in the dramatic music the lullaby with its refrain, and also the progression of sadness though sorrow and pain to final ease. She gave us a deeply moving performance.
It came in the middle of the program, after variations on the familiar tune of “Greensleeves” composed and performed by Dornenburg, and another familiar carol from England, “Sweet Was the Song the Virgin Sang.” Traditional French carols with jaunty rhythms gave way later to the uplifting and upbeat “Adesto multitude coelestis excercitus” of Samuel Capricornus and familiar names from Germany towards the end: Buxtehude, Bach and Telemann.
Queen Anne Christian Church is small and the atmosphere intimate. Each instrumental role could be clearly heard in every detail, and Hargis’s voice production sounded easy at all times. If anything, her top notes were almost too loud for this tiny venue. The whole made a pleasurable start to the season. After all ,we only have 25 days to make the most of it this year.
