Daniel Hope’s Breezy Tour of the Renaissance

Violinist Daniel Hope, leader of last night’s ensemble (from his San Francisco Performances event page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances presented the second installment in its Hear Now and Then Series with a program entitled AIR—A Baroque Journey. The plan for the program was conceived by violinist Daniel Hope, who led an ensemble whose other members were five virtuoso collaborators: violinist Simon Papanas, cellist Nicola Mosca, lutenist Emanuele Forni, keyboardist Naoki Kitaya, and percussionist Michael Metzler. The violins and cello were modern instruments, but they were played with baroque bows. In addition, Mosca was not always seated, playing his instrument while joining in a procession around the stage, an achievement far superior to that of Woody Allen playing cello in a marching band in Take the Money and Run.

To be fair, the program was not so much a “journey” beginning in the fifteenth century and progressing to the eighteenth. It was more of a heady stew in which ingredients from one century kept bumping into those from another. The “spice” of that stew had less to do with the compositions being offered and more to do with how they were played.

To set the context for this proposition, I would like to reflect on one of my own early encounters with Renaissance music, which happened to involve the first work on last night’s program, a ricercar by Diego Ortiz. During my graduate student days, I was an avid customer of the Musical Heritage Society (MHS); and it did not take long for me to “get into” my first purchase of a Renaissance album, after which I went through a period of playing it incessantly. The Ortiz ricercar basically consisted of a series of different ways to weave melodic gestures over a repeated bass line. I quickly discovered that two different viol players were alternating in playing those gestures, which turned into my first insight that the jazz practice of “trading fours” was alive and thriving roughly half a millennium before the word “jazz” became part of our lexicon.

Much later I had a chance to see a reproduction of Ortiz’ manuscript. It consisted only of the repeated bass line and a single melodic line. It said nothing about instrumentation nor about how many instrumentalists were to be involved. The musicians on the MHS album had made those decisions for themselves. At a time when very few knew about “Dueling Banjos” (the film Deliverance would only come out about five years later), here was a Renaissance ensemble engaging in a practice familiar to bluegrass banjo players as well as the jazz world.

I must thus confess more than a little disappointment when, last night, Hope played the Ortiz ricercar as a melody line for solo instrument. Nevertheless, as the evening progressed, it became clear that his group was well aware that the jazz practice of jamming had its roots in the Renaissance (and probably earlier than that). More often than not, the entire group displayed highly-skilled intuitions in how to turn static marks on paper into opportunities for improvisation. The “dueling” interplay of the two violinists was most evident in one of Antonio Vivaldi’s sonatas for two violins, the twelfth (and last) of the sonatas in his Opus 1 based on the Folia theme. In their performance Hope and Papanas had no trouble departing from the variations that Vivaldi had written to unfold exploratory variations of their own, one of which bore an unmistakable “family resemblance” to a passage from The Four Seasons.

Serving as “guide” for this “journey,” rather than just a performer or group leader, Hope delivered remarks about each offering on the program. He almost always found that “sweet spot” where he could talk about the content without trivializing it but also without sounding like one of Anna Russell’s “great experts,” there to edify other “great experts.” Nevertheless, there were occasions that felt as if the casual setting could have done with a bit more discipline. Those familiar with our own “local talent” for early music performances would probably have recognized those moments when Hope and Papanas had not come to an agreement over intonation. (There were more than a scattered few of them.) Also, Hope’s attempt to make a joke about the encore selection of Johann Sebastian Bach being a “recent discovery” when it was actually one of the most familiar of warhorses (often known by a name Bach never used, “Air on the G String”) went over like a lead balloon. (Hope did not confine himself to the G string.)

Nevertheless, because last night’s recital took place so soon after the appearance of Quicksilver in Herbst earlier this month, it was hard to shake the impression that Hope had summoned a collection of players in contrast to Quicksilver being an ensemble of musicians who had been together for some time and could bring an intuitive spontaneity to everything they played.