Spoken and played

Festival Music Society of Indiana musical director Frank Cooper continues to seek new, innovative vehicles to present early music to receptive audiences. Since 1972, when he began calling the shots for the FMS, Cooper has engaged the most diverse of early-music performers and groups, in the most diverse venues — both inside and out. It’s been an exciting, often rewarding run and hopefully will continue for years to come.

From left to right: Charles Coe, Sarah Frieberg and Rhona Freeman performed as part of the Early Music Festival last weekend.

For the sparsely attended fifth of the six concerts in this summer’s Early Music Festival at the Indianapolis Art Center, Cooper may, this time, have mis-stepped. Mixing poetry and music in almost equal amounts is surely a novel notion, and might indeed work well under some conditions. In my view, we didn’t have those at last Friday’s concert.

Charles Coe, a Massachusetts resident born and raised in Indianapolis and a poet himself, read works from such masters-of-the-word as Shakespeare (Sonnet 128), John Dryden, Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Twain and Whitman. Two or three of these each preceded a musical work from mostly obscure composers of the late Baroque played by the Freeman/Freiberg Duo: harpsichordist Rhona Freeman and cellist Sarah Freiberg.

Call me uninformed, naïve, lacking in cultivation — and even incompetent (as did a NUVO letter writer a month or so ago) — but I failed to find any real symbiosis between the verses read and the music played, granting that the selected poems had music as their theme. Alternating between first-rate poetry and second-rate non-poetic Baroque fare seemed unflattering to both. For music, we had cello-harpsichord sonatas by such people as Francesco Guerini, an early mid-18th century — and vapid — Classicist; Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, who never met a mordent (a decorative, ornamental turn endemic in the Baroque era) he didn’t like; and Antonio Vivaldi, the only major composer — but not represented by a major work.

For me, Coe’s own prose-leaning poetry provided the most interesting readings. At one point, Coe, an African-American, read his “White Boy Plays the Blues,” first suggesting that it takes a black musician to understand and “jive” with this jazzform … only to reveal that the white player has musically bonded with all present: He “feels” it; the black audience feels it with him, and that race has less to do with a species of talent than people might have thought.

Freeman also displayed “soul” with pieces from the Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in D Minor by French composer Antoine Forqueray (1671-1745). This was the only relevant connection between verse and ensuing notes that I heard all evening.
It remains to say that the Freeman/Freiberg Duo gave their chosen repertoire as well-presented an exposure as could be hoped for.