I wasn't there, but the NY Times was:
January 18, 2005 MUSIC REVIEW | PAUL O'DETTE Practitioner of the Gentle Art of Playing the Baroque Lute By ALLAN KOZINN As the artistic director of the Boston Early Music Festival, Paul O'Dette=20 has been devoting an increasing amount of his energy to conducting Baroque= =20 opera. But he has not set aside the lute, the gentle-voiced instrument on=20 which he has performed virtuosically and with an uncommon textural clarity= =20 for 30 years. On Sunday afternoon, he gave a lute recital as part of the=20 Music Before 1800 series at Corpus Christi Church, and reassured fans of=20 his lute playing that his operatic distractions have taken no toll. He has, in fact, taken on a new challenge, that of moving from the=20 Renaissance to the Baroque lute. The transition is not inconsequential. The= =20 Renaissance instrument, in its classic form, has six double strings (called= =20 courses); the Baroque model comes in various sizes, but the instrument Mr.= =20 O'Dette played was a 13-course lute. Those extra strings extend the lute's= =20 reach into the bass, and the composers of the time made full use of that=20 expanded range. The Baroque instrument is tuned differently as well. Think= =20 of the change as roughly akin to moving from the clavichord to the piano. The heart of the Baroque lute repertory is the handful of Bach works that=20 exist in versions either for the lute or for the lautenwerk, a keyboard=20 instrument that was meant to approximate the lute's timbre. Mr. O'Dette=20 played three of these - an adaptation of the first cello suite, as "Pi=E8ces= =20 pour la Luth =E0 M. Schouster" (BWV 995), and versions of the Sonata No. 1= =20 (BWV 1001) and the Partita No. 3 (BWV 1006a), both more familiar as=20 unaccompanied violin works. The lute versions have much in their favor. As a polyphonic instrument, the= =20 lute can offer harmonies and lines of counterpoint that are only implied in= =20 the violin and cello versions. And the plucked strings give the works a=20 transparency more akin to a keyboard performance than a bowed one. Mr. O'Dette made the most of those differences. But the principal=20 attraction of his readings was in their fluidity of tempos, a=20 characteristic that underscored the influence of French dance music in the= =20 Partita and the "Pi=E8ces." In the Sonata his approach was more suitably=20 formal, but no less dazzling: his rendering of its Fugue was a model of=20 balance and precision. Mr. O'Dette also played a Suite in C minor by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, with a= =20 Weiss Fantasia, usually performed separately, affixed as a prelude. Weiss=20 and Bach were exact contemporaries, and they knew each other. In 1739 they= =20 presented a fugue improvisation contest in Leipzig, and Bach adopted one of= =20 Weiss's lute works as the basis of the A-major Violin Sonata (BWV 1025).=20 The suite that Mr. O'Dette played was lively, ornate and rich in the kind=20 of sequenced figuration that sits comfortably on the lute. Still, apart=20 from its zestily contrapuntal Gigue, it was not quite the equal of the Bach= =20 scores. <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/arts/music//ref/membercenter/help/copyrig= ht.html>Copyright=20 2005, <http://www.nytco.com/>The New York Times Company -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
