Early Music Seattle joined the year-long Shakespeare celebration here Saturday night with an all Shakespeare-infused program in which Seattle Baroque Orchestra had pared itself down to a minimum for the performance at Nordstrom Recital Hall with just six performers, a quartet of strings plus lute and harpsichord.
The big draw for the evening was Canadian soprano Suzie LeBlanc, who alternated with the instrumentalists for a dozen or more songs set to words from Shakespeare’s plays, many from The Tempest and including the music from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, an entertainment set loosely on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (though Purcell didn’t use Shakespeare’s own words for the songs).
LeBlanc was a perfect choice for this. Her voice is well cored and there is no breathiness or edginess marring her round, true, and lovely sound, used without vibrato. This stood her in good stead with the very florid ornamentation appropriate to the songs, all of which she encompassed with every note clear, nothing blurred or slid, and much of it fast and wide-ranging over a couple of octaves. She used it for emphasis and expression and some of it would have been awesomely difficult. Hers is an amazing vocal technique, nonetheless for the apparent ease with which she used it.
Only one piece could have been composed while Shakespeare was still alive (he died 1617), Robert Johnson’s “Full Fathom Five,” likely used in the premiere of The Tempest as he was court lutenist (say the notes) but many were composed during the succeeding century. According to the notes, the anonymous folk melody for the “Willow Song,” not unfamiliar even today, might well have accompanied the song in a production of Othello, while a century later Thomas Arne composed quite a bit of music for the plays including one performed here from As You Like It, “Blow, Thy Winter Blow.”
All of it, both songs and instrumental music, were a delight to the ear, most of them cheerful, vigorous or sprightly, some rustic in feel. None were lengthy, some played with all six musicians, some fewer, some songs with just continuo, there was constant variety to enjoy. The exception in both length and feeling was the “Willow Song,” which Desdemona sings. It has many verses, slow and sad, and LeBlanc imbued all of it with that emotion including in her stance. She began it quite unaccompanied, the lute joining her very softly on several further verses, then all the musicians and finally just LeBlanc alone, an effective way of presenting it.
The composers included some whose names are fairly familiar to early music lovers, like Matthew Locke, Robert Johnson, Pelham Humfrey, and others less known, Maurice Greene, John Banister, Pietro Reggio, John Weldon. Purcell had the second half of the program to himself with eight excerpts from The Fairy Queen, a couple of which were familiar, but many not so, until the final song on the program, nothing to do with Shakespeare, Purcell’s beautiful “Music for a While.”
The program was divided into groups of four or five short pieces performed without breaks, so that continual applause didn’t break up the flow. This made a lot of sense, but it would have made a big difference for the song words to have been included in the program. Although LeBlanc was enunciating very clearly, words still didn’t come through except in snatches.
Most of the songs were accompanied only by David Walker on lute or theorbo, cellist Annabeth Shirley and SBO director Alexander Weimann at the harpsichord, while the other string players were Linda Melsted and Christine Wilkinson Beckman and violist Jason Fisher. The balance throughout was excellent. LeBlanc never had to worry that her voice at its softest wouldn’t be heard.
