'Windy' concert will blow into Hill church Saturday

by MICHAEL CARUSO

An intriguing concert will take place at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave., this Saturday, October 23, at 8 p.m. The locally based yet internationally acclaimed Renaissance wind band, Piffaro, will perform a program entitled "The French Connection: Northern Composers at the Courts of Rome." The ensemble will be joined by vielle player Shira Kammen and the group Trefoil, which includes vocalists and instrumentalists Drew Minter, Mark Rimple and Marcia Young.

Piffaro's Joan Kimball explained the program's genesis by pointing out that most of the scores in the group's repertoire date from the 16th century and onward. "We've not programmed that much music from the 15th century," she said, "and the chance to work with Shira and Trefoil gave us the opportunity to do so.

"Drew Minter is a world-class countertenor," Kimball continued, "and we've known Mark Rimple (a composer and countertenor who teaches at West Chester University) for years, so that connection brought us together with Trefoil. We've known Shira for the excellence of her playing the vielle - an early, plucked string instrument - and so we thought that bringing her into the program would make for beautiful colors between the voices, the recorders and shawms, and the plucked strings."

Kimball explained that the Papal court in Rome during the late 14th and 15th centuries, by hiring musicians from northern France and Flanders, helped give rise to the new international style of composition that dominated the music of Europe for the next century and more. Guillaume Dufay was at the head of a group of Flemish composers whose music still enchants and enthralls listeners today.

"And we're all very excited to have added Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church to our concert series," Kimball added. "It's a wonderful space and we enjoy playing in Chestnut Hill."

For ticket information call 215-235-8469 or visit www.piffaro.com.

CHORAL CONCERT

The sacred choral music composed during the 16th and early 17th centuries remains, for me, the most beautiful music ever written. Composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Josquin, Victoria and Palestrina occupy the highest levels of musical genius in my opinion. It was, therefore, with the greatest anticipation that I looked forward to hearing the Philadelphia Singers' program entitled "Renaissance Glories" this past Friday evening, all the more so since the choir had abandoned the acoustical dryness of the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater in favor of the Victorian resonance of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square.

The concert, as it turned out, looked better on paper than it sounded in performance. Although the music was splendidly chosen - Tallis' If ye love me, Byrd's Mass for Five Voices, Josquin's Ave Maria, Victoria's Vidi aquam and O magnum mysterium, and Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli - not all these masterpieces received equally splendid renditions.

Hayes and the Singers gave the Mass for Five Voices a reading bereft of the visceral passion of commitment to a forbidden faith, an emotional vitality that courses through every note. The singing was mostly accomplished - with a few notable exceptions in the "Credo" - but listless. It was polite even though the music isn't. The music is radical; the singing was contented.

PIANO VIRTUOSITY

Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor is so awesome a score that it dominates any program on which it appears. Such was certainly the case Saturday night in Verizon Hall when Yefim Bronfman took up the challenge of playing it with James Conlon and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The real challenge of the evening was faced by the Steinway concert grand Bronfman played - simply to survive intact his overwhelming digital power.

Fortunately - for the piano, the music and the audience - Bronfman is more than just a technical superman. He is a sublime musician who went far beyond meeting the score's demands to delineate its alternately nostalgic and triumphant moods. He sustained the long line above the multitude of accompanying notes to sing out those melancholy melodies just as he scaled the score's dizzying peaks of pyrotechnical dazzle.

The program's other major work was the reconstructed Symphony No. 2 by Viktor Ullmann, one of those unfortunate Jewish musicians who, unlike the stupendously talented Erich Wolfgang Korngold, did not escape the clutches of the Nazis during the 1930s and who died at their hands at Auschwitz in 1944. Although the music is marked by occasional moments of beauty, it lacks the organic development that characterized both the film scores and concert works of Korngold, generally acknowledged as the foremost of all Hollywood composers. Although Conlon led it with strength and sensitivity, it received a polite but lukewarm response from the audience.

COMIC OPERA

The Opera Company of Philadelphia's second production of the season, Donizetti's Don Pasquale, is both one of the ensemble's best efforts in years and the most delightful and intelligent mounting of this opera I've ever seen. It triumphs both theatrically and musically, evincing both understanding and laughter. It continues at the Academy of Music through October 31.