With their magical imagery and multiple musical cues, the plays of William Shakespeare have been a constant source of inspiration, for composers from the playwright’s era to our own.
Three of those composers figured prominently in a concert led by Jordi Savall on Saturday evening at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. Presiding over the orchestra Le Concert des Nations, the brilliant conductor, instrumentalist, and early music specialist built a splendid and aptly dramatic program around 17th-century instrumental music for Shakespeare’s plays by composers Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke, and Robert Johnson.
Included on the Cal Performances program — the second of two over the weekend for Savall and his tremendously gifted period-instrument ensemble — were Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, Locke’s Music for The Tempest, and Johnson’s Jacobean Masque and Stage Music.
In Saturday’s vibrant performances, the connections were unmistakable. Each work brims with inventive harmonic language, delightful dance episodes, and indelible musical depictions of the enflamed lovers, exotic creatures, drunken rustics, and otherworldly spirits featured in Shakespearean comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in the plays categorized as romances — including The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale — written late in Shakespeare’s career. Under Savall’s agile, energetic direction, it all sounded wonderfully beguiling.
Yet what impressed about the performance were the distinctions that Savall and his group drew. From the dark, turbulent music of The Tempest to the diaphanous beauties of The Fairy Queen, these were the kind of vigorous, detailed readings designed to banish memories of the pale, lackluster, period-instrument concerts of yesteryear.
Savall, of course, makes the difference. The Barcelona-born musician has earned international acclaim as an instrumentalist (his primary instrument is the viola da gamba), conductor, and music director of the ensembles Hesperion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya.
Savall’s Newest Ensemble a Winner
Le Concert des Nations, his youngest group, is a marvel. The first orchestra of its kind composed chiefly of musicians from Latin countries, it is a remarkably flexible and responsive ensemble. Forceful it is, too: With only 14 players (15 when Savall left the podium to take up the gamba), the group produces a world of sound.
The Fairy Queen, performed in the second half, was the evening’s highlight. Under Savall’s direction, Purcell’s extroverted movements — the jigs, the hornpipes, the astonishingly dissonant “Dance for the Green Men” — came across with winning exuberance, while the composer’s tender fairy-music has perhaps never sounded so radiant and transparent. The orchestra played with admirable unanimity, while the score afforded the players numerous solo opportunities. In particular, Manfredo Kraemer (the group’s concertino), Riccardo Minasi and Alba Roca (violins), Enrique Solinis (theorbo), and David Mayoral (percussion) all made handsome contributions.
Before intermission, Savall elicited a dynamic, finely etched performance of Locke’s music for The Tempest. The conductor and his players made easy work of the triple-meter movements (including the fleet “Galliard” and the wonderfully syncopated “Rustick Air”), and lent the dramatic “Lilk” movement plenty of portent. In the atmospheric “Curtain Tune,” a listener could almost taste the air of Prospero’s island, while the concluding double canon evoked both the joy and the resignation of Shakespeare’s bittersweet resolution.
The program opened with a witty, vivacious sampling of Johnson’s music from The Masque of Oberon, The Winter’s Tale, and The Witch. Here, too, the listener was struck by the infinite variety of the dance music. Savall, serving as soloist, brought the warm, tawny sound of the gamba into gorgeous relief.
He was back on the podium for the evening’s encore, a zesty contra dance from Rameau’s Les Boréades. Savall asked the audience to supply handclaps in the percussion parts; they responded enthusiastically, and mostly in time.