Musical Love Stories Told by Ensemble Caprice

Ensemble Caprice members Ziya Tabassian, David Jacques, Matthias Maute, Sophie Larivière, and Susie Napper (photograph by Bill Blackstone, from the event page for this concert)

Yesterday afternoon at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the San Francisco Early Music Society presented a return visit by Montreal-based Ensemble Caprice. This group is distinguished by the dazzling virtuoso recorder playing by its two Directors, Matthias Maute and Sophie Larivière. Cellist Susie Napper provides solid continuo work, often peppered with vigorous embellishment. Somewhat more subdued continuo is provided by guitarist David Jacques, but he was also given an opportunity to play solo. Finally, Ziya Tabassian brings an impressive array of percussion instruments on which he creates his own appropriate accompaniment.

The title of the program was iLove Baroque—Short Histories and Voices of Eternity. The program was structured around love stories about composers from Germany, Italy, what is now the Czech Republic, England, and Spain. Each of the tales was narrated by Maute and then supplemented by one or more musical selections to establish context.

For the most part the idea worked better in theory than in practice. Maute turned out to be a disappointing narrator, perhaps because he was not familiar with English diction or perhaps because he never seemed to handle his microphone effectively. Even the tales themselves did not register very well, particularly the one about Spanish composer Santiago de Murcia that speculated that he fled to Mexico with his sweetheart in 1740, which happens to be the year after Murcia’s death. There also was a problem with the first of the tales and its related music in that it was not listed on the program page and mentioned only in Maute’s program notes.

Nevertheless, if one dispensed with the purported logic behind the program and just listened to the music, the results were almost entirely consistently engaging. Indeed, Murcia was a guitarist, meaning that his share of the program provided the one opportunity to enjoy Jacques’ skills. That use of “almost,” however, refers to the portion of the program devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach. Maute decided to arrange the Chaconne movement from the BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor for two recorders and cello. There have, of course, been no end of transcriptions of this movement for different instrumental resources; but this one did no favors to either virtuoso recorder technique or Bach himself.

Nevertheless, the liabilities of the afternoon were decidedly outweighed by the overall musicianship of the ensemble and the delightful repertoire presented by their program, much, if not most, of which would have involved first-contact experiences for the audience.