It is not every day that "Sylvan and Oceanic Delights" inhabit the halls of Berkeley's Northbrae Community Church, but a happy audience tasted those delights there Friday night. Northbrae's Haver Hall was outfitted to represent the Royal Hall of Naples on Carnival Sunday, 1620.
The Delights of Posilipo, a "fête with dances," was originally presented to flatter the viceroy of Naples, Don Pedro Girón, and to celebrate the "return to health" of Philip III of Austria, "King of the Spains." Gilbert Martinez, artistic director of MusicSources, has long been interested in producing this court ballet for singers, instrumentalists, and dancers. Stage instructions, a libretto, and most of the music have survived in an edition published in 1975 by musicologist Roland Jackson. Dr. Jackson was present for this performance.
Posilipo is short on narrative and long on spectacle, as can be seen by a list of the dramatis personae: Deities Pan, Venus, Cupid, and Sebeto (a river deity); personifications Fortune, Time, Fame, and Envy; and an assortment of sylvan and oceanic creatures, sirens, nymphs, satyrs, swans, and cavaliers. Several composers are credited with the music, but attribution was made in the program only to one: Giovanni Maria Trabaci, whose music for Venus and three sirens was elegantly performed by Rita Lilly, Phoebe Jevtovic Alexander, and Kathryn Miller. I found no information in the program as to the composer of Cupid's aria ending the fête. Utterly Spanish in sound and rhythm (in honor of Philip), it was brilliantly sung by Cecilia Engelhart Lopez. MusicSources had assembled an excellent ensemble of singers, another standout being bass Paul Thompson as Pan. Ensemble singing, while not always perfectly balanced, was uniformly spirited.
A Continuo Blowout
The ensemble Galileo Project, a coproducer of the fête with MusicSources, formed the core of a splendid Renaissance band, which boasted "the largest continuo ensemble ever assembled in the Bay Area." I suspect that some productions at UC Berkeley and Stanford in the 1960s and '70s may have come close to matching — but perhaps not surpassing — the number of instruments. The stage overflowed with harps, harpsichords, guitars, lutes, theorbos, spinets, cello, lyrone, and percussion. A recorder, viola, and two violins provided melodies. Varying combinations of the instruments were used for differing effects. Tuning was exemplary and the Renaissance rhythms were eminently danceable.
In an inspired moment of community outreach, MusicSources worked with a third coproducer: the UC Santa Cruz Theater Arts Department. UCSC students studied early Italian theater and participated as actors, costume makers and dancers. Nina Treadwell, from the UCSC music faculty, was Martinez' assistant musical director, and Mark Franko was the choreographer and stage director. The dancers were delightfully energetic and wound their way through a variety of scenes and changing roles. Most of the characters were doubled: sung by singers and danced by dancers. Unfortunately, the dancing did not rise to the high technical and stylistic level of the music-making.
I learned from Martinez that there were only a couple of choreographies extant for this work — such as the dance of Pan and Venus — and even these described only the pattern of the dance on the floor, and not the steps. And in fact, the patterns of movement in this performance were attractive and well-executed, as were several arrangements of bodies in tableau. But the dance was hardly a reconstruction of what must have been presented to the viceroy of Naples. It owed more to modern ballet and Peter Sellars than to Fabritio Caroso or Cesare Negri, who published detailed descriptions of Italian dance steps in the early 1600s.
Some scores of the musical numbers in
Posilipo are missing, so the modern editor has to supply music from other sources to match the text or the description of a dance. For the dance of Pan and Venus, Martinez arranged a
gagliarda Napolitana by Antonio Valente. So why could a Renaissance
galliard not be found to suit Valente's score? Why was the dance choreographed in modern ballet style, which had no correspondence to the music we were hearing?
There are Bay Area dancers who can perform Renaissance and Baroque dance at the same level of competence as that of the musicians involved in this performance. Student musicians from UC Santa Cruz joined their teacher in the band, playing with musicians of technical mastery matched to a strong sense of Renaissance style. What a pity that the student dancers did not have a similar experience, and that the audience did not get a glimpse of what the viceroy of Naples saw in 1620.