Dear lutenists, While having a glass of Malbec wine and my memory is still reasonably fresh, I'd like to share a few coments about the concert that Anthony Rooley and Emma Kirkby gave here in Rio de Janeiro last Friday. First of all, I was very excited to see two very famous specialists in early music in a recital dedicated to English songs (Dowland, Campion and Coprario). By coincidence my last concert was on English songs as well...
The hall is fairly large one, 835 seats to be specific. However the acoustics is wonderful, I've seen many great concerts there. But that night only one third of the hall was full and I on purpose was seating on the 8th row (about the middle of the theatre) just because I wanted to know how the duo would deal with the sound projection in such a place. For a moment before the concert I thought that it might be amplified... silly thought, it wasn't. The concert began and they made a very good visual impression, she was dressed beautifully, perfect for the ocasion while he was more discreet but nevertheless good looking on stage. Her singing was superb from the beguinning of the concert to the end, hard to describe how well sang: Her gestures, phrasing, dynamics, interpretaion, diction, knowledge of the style, sensitivity, everything combined to deliver a first class recital. Well, I was suposed to be talking about the lute! Sorry... On the other hand, the lute sound was very, very, very small... Anthony joked before the second half explaining about the English lute song repertoire and especially the lute: "The smallest sounding instrument men ever built" (his words...), people laughed, unfortunately for a moment a felt myself as having "The smallest pXnXs in the world"... In fact it was hard to hear his (Anthony) playing and in the few ocasions where he did solos, it was also painful to hear or to understand what he was doing. later I understood why. The second half I sat at the third row on the right side of the hall. I must say it was better not only to see Emma's closely and wach her expressions but also to hear the poor chap on the lute. Then I had a better idea of what was going on. Apart from the size of the hall being not ideal for such a performance, the lutenist was playing with guitar technique, not resting the pinky on the soundboard and not plucking the strings properly (I mean, using the technique described by Pat O'Brian as releasing the finger from the string, which enhances the sound quite a bit), his hand was also jumping every chord he played and finally there was no sight of thumb under or even thumb over (as Nigel North) in the divisions and scales. It was not for free that his overrall sound was very stacato and specially the divisions were very non legato with his index middle alternation. My impression was simply that he did not bring the sound effectively from the instrument and in fact everyone I knew in the concert complained about it (I'm not that crazy...) After the recital I decided to ask him a few questions. He said he was using nylon strings and Pyramid wounded basses. Well, at least now is very clear why the sound was so dark on the trebles besides of his faulty technique... With PVF or even better Nylgut (gut would be very tricky) the result could have been a little better. This kind of event makes me feel great by seing our instrument being exposed to an wider audience, but the general feeling according to most people that I know including musicians, that the lute is not apt to the concert plataform, still remains. Note - Coments welcomed! -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
