Launched only a few months ago, Chicago Baroque Ensemble is the newest of the area’s period-instrument groups that have sprung up in the wake of City Musick’s much-lamented demise. But already the newcomer is playing to enthusiastic audiences and giving the kind of stylish performances on which lasting reputations are based.
So it was Sunday afternoon in the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery at Northwestern University, where the group gave a concert of 17th and early 18th Century Italian vocal and instrumental works by Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Cesti and Alessandro Stradella. Beyond the informed and informative performances, the program proved valuable for its tracing the influence of the Roman school on George Frideric Handel, whose three-year sojourn in Italy was to shape his mature style so decisively.
The intimate Block Gallery, its white walls hung on this occasion with Brancusi photographs, proved a congenial space for the music both physically and acoustically. And cellist John Mark Rozendaal’s verbal program notes deftly mixed easy wit and careful scholarship.
Most impressive were trio sonatas by Corelli and Handel, along with Corelli’s well-known “La Follia” variations, the latter work a veritable lexicon of Italian baroque violin technique. Whether gracefully intertwining melodic lines or playing elegant games of musical tag, violinists Christopher Verrette and Jennifer Roig-Francoli were splendid, as were the continuo contributions of Rozendaal, harpsichordist James Brown and contrabassist Jerry Fuller.
The warm climate of Italian lyricism pervades the Handel duets “Langue, geme, sospira” and “Tanti strali,” both about the exquisite pain of love and desire. The well-matched singers here were guests Linda Dayiantis-Straub, soprano, and Mark Crayton, alto. She revealed a fresh, limpid voice, well projected, square on pitch and clearly enunciated; his soft-centered countertenor was musical and pleasing, if weak in the lower range and lacking what the Italians call punto, or point.
The only disappointment was a Cesti cantata (about the singing of a cantata), that seemed to go on and on because the soprano missed most of its playful, self-referential humor: Greater dynamic, vocal and expressive variety was needed. A Stradella cantata on the Crucifixion subject-its tragic pathos effectively conveyed-completed the program.
