New York Times

Music Review | GEMS Project

Who Needs Carnegie Hall? Early Music in a Greenwich Village Club

By JAMES R. OESTREICH
Published: October 2, 2009

What is early music? Literally, it is a repertory, comprising music
from ‘ take your pick ‘ the 18th century and before? The 19th and
before? By extension, the early-music movement came to include a
philosophy of performance that flourished in the 20th century as
musicians increasingly tried to replicate the sounds and styles of
particular eras.

Now, at least in New York, early music has also become a scene. The
two-year-old Gotham Early Music Scene lived up to its name this week
with the GEMS Project, a series of three programs at Le Poisson Rouge,
the trendy Greenwich Village club that is taking the classical music
world by storm.

By any definition, early music is wildly diverse. The project’s
format, developed in previous concerts, presented three groups per
evening, and the first program, on Wednesday, was diverse perhaps to a
fault.

Uncommon Temperament, a group of young Baroque performers, opened with
works of Handel: a trio sonata and a soprano version of the cantata
`Mi Palpita il Cor,’ sung by Ariadne Greif.

The performances were accomplished and winning, and Ms. Greif made a
game attempt to turn the cantata, a young man’s expression of coronary
twitter in the face of budding love, into something mildly
dramatic. Reclining in a chair, she enacted the work as a psychiatric
session: alas, a one-line joke that without real character development
wore thin long before she scribbled the check at the end.

East of the River, another group led by the recorder virtuosos Nina
Stern and Daphna Mor, brought a spirit from east of East River,
Brooklyn, to music more or less east of the Danube, as Ms. Stern
suggested in preperformance remarks. The listing of Armenian,
Macedonian, Italian, Bulgarian and Greek tunes suggested greater
variety than emerged from the stage, where an air of modern-day
klezmer seemed an insistent presence.

The Clarion
this setting, taking the stage in concert garb to present music from
the court of Catherine the Great. This is a theme, mixing Western
European influences and indigenous composition in St. Petersburg, that
could barely be suggested in a third of a concert. Ilya Poletaev gave
a charming performance of a harpsichord sonata by Baldassare
Galuppi. A two-movement string quartet by Anton Ferdinand Titz and
arias from operas by Yevstigney Fomin and Bortniansky made little
impression, bereft of context.

Except that provided in an overlong spoken introduction by Clarion’s
music director, Steven Fox. In general, the talk, guided by Gotham’s
executive director, Gene Murrow, proved awkward, finding little middle
ground between forced banter and scholarly disquisition.

Mr. Murrow claimed in initial remarks to have found `the perfect
place’ for early music that was performed among `friends eating and
drinking,’ and you could live with the occasional crashes of
plates. The noise from the ventilation system and the often unsubtle
miking represented more serious compromises.

And if catchall programs are to be any wave of the future, a way must
be found to make disparate elements speak to one another rather than
merely coexist.
From: Baghdasarian