An All-Dowland Program from Les Voix Humaines

Yesterday afternoon at the Church of the Advent of Christ the King, the San Francisco Early Music Society presented the San Francisco debut of the Quebec-based ensemble Les Voix Humaines. Five of the six members of this group play gamba instruments of different sizes. They are Mélisande Corriveau, Margaret Little, Felix Deak, Marie-Laurence Primeau, and Susie Napper; and they were joined by lutenist Nigel North.

The program, entitled Lachrimæ, consisted entirely of music by John Dowland. The title referred to a 1604 publication entitled Lachrimæ or seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans, with divers other pavans, galliards and allemands, set forth for the lute, viols, or violons, in five parts. The seven “passionate pavans” provided the “spinal cord” of the program, interleaved with several of the “divers other” pavanes and galliards. In addition North played three lute solos, as well as “Dowland’s Adieu,” a duo for lute and bass viol.

The “teares” themselves served as seven variations on the theme of a Dowland song “Flow my tears,” which had been published in 1600. Several of the “teares” themselves were introduced with readings of individual verses from this song, but there does not appear to be any sign of intended correlation between the verses of the song and the seven instrumental settings of its theme. Indeed, while each of those seven settings has its own title describing a different aspect of weeping, the variations from one setting to the next tend to be sufficiently subtle to require a keen ear and a sense of performance practices to be able to tell them apart.

Some of that difficulty has to do with the nature of the pavan itself. The music is slow and stately. The overall structure is A-A’-B-B’-C-C’, which is also the structure of Dowland’s galliards. The performance was rich with embellishment techniques, making it a bit difficult to discern which embellishments had been published and which were part of the ensemble’s performance practices. From a personal point of view, I would say that I was better aware of the rhetorical diversity of Dowland’s compositions following the intermission break, as if the first half of the program had served to adjust my listening practices to an unfamiliar setting.

However, if informed listening required more effort than usual, one definitely could not fault the performance technique of Les Voix Humaines. There was a consistent clarity in their delivery of the individual selections, and one could appreciate the extent to which each player was consistently aware of the others. Nevertheless, the program, taken as a whole, never quite managed to overcome the problem of subjecting listeners to too much of a good thing.