Chicago’s early-music scene has experienced more bumps and blips over the last several years than the stock market, what with the demise of two esteemed period-instrument ensembles, City Musick and Basically Bach, and the recent arrival of another period band, the promising Chicago Baroque Ensemble.
But the ensemble that started it all, the Newberry Consort, sails on happily, unaffected by the administrative conflicts and fiscal distress that sank the efforts of its offspring.
The consort’s success can be regarded, in part, as a reassuring sign that general interest in music leading from the Middle Ages right up to Bach and Handel stands at an all-time high.
Recordings of music by the 12th Century abbess Hildegard of Bingen have captured the ears of the New Age crowd, and Anonymous 4’s “An English Ladymass” has given Harmonia Mundi one of its all-time chart-busting releases. CD sales figures, moreover, bear witness to the fact that the works of contemporary composers Henryk Gorecki and John Tavener (both of whom echo the modes and manners of ancient music) exert a powerful appeal to listeners in search of “new” sounds that aren’t abrasively dissonant.
Another way of looking at the success of the Newberry Consort is to examine the artistic product the group has been lovingly polishing for more than 10 seasons. And nobody knows more about that subject than Mary Springfels, the spirited viola da gamba virtuoso who founded the ensemble at the Newberry Library in 1982. She remains the library’s musician-in-residence and the group’s chief spokesperson.
Springfels talks about early music with much the same passion she draws from her gamba, the often recalcitrant ancestor of the modern cello.
“In the 1990s, the most important thing for a musical organization to do is to keep small and flexible,” she insists. “Over the years the library has been willing to absorb a certain amount of our deficit, which is marvelous of them. The deficit (which will run about $40,000 this season, after ticket sales, according to consort manager Fred Leise) has not been outrageous because we are small and have kept small. We are a chamber music group that does not want to be an opera or oratorio company.”
With the umbrella support of the library, and the Newberry’s rich and extensive collection of old musical manuscripts (many of them still unheard) to draw upon, Springfels has the freedom to boldly go where few, if any, early-music groups have gone before.
She and her colleagues-other core ensemble members are Drew Minter, countertenor; and David Douglass, early violins-enjoy challenging their audience with each concert, seeing how far they can get their listeners to follow them into a given repertory. Disdaining the scattershot programming that is rife in today’s concert halls, the Newberry Consort carefully builds each of its programs around a given manuscript, concept or body of works.
The group’s upcoming concerts, for example, will celebrate the art of courtly love as cultivated by the great poet-musicians of 13th Century France, the troubadors and trouveres. (Dates are Friday at the Newberry Library, Saturday at Lake Forest College and next Sunday at Grace Episcopal Church, Oak Park. Joining Springfels, Minter and Douglass in these concerts will be guest artists Ellen Hargis, soprano, and Paula Chateauneuf, medieval lute.)
Equally imaginative is the May 5-7 season finale, titled “A Medieval Bestiary,” which comprises 13th to 15th Century French and Italian works about animals as symbols of humankind’s virtues and vices.
If this smacks of a didactic approach, one that would appeal to specialists but fall flat with a general audience, the full houses for which the consort performs at its three regular venues prove otherwise. These highly skilled virtuosi enjoy a warm, comfortable rapport with each other on stage that removes any sense of a barrier that might separate them, the music and the listener. Which is why their audience feels it is hearing less a performance than a jam session of musicians in a 14th Century French court.
“The audiences that come to our concerts attend partly because they know we don’t make (artistic) compromises. They know we don’t just play the Greatest Hits,” explains Douglass. “We do music that is challenging to listen to as well as for us to play. Our listeners, too, invest energy in the performances.”
That’s not all the consort’s loyal public invests. Leise reports individual contributions have tripled since he joined the organization last July, and subscription renewals ran as high as 85 percent this season. The number of subscribers stands at about 200, an increase of nearly 250 percent over the previous year. The consort has just released its fifth recording for Harmonia Mundi, a CD devoted to music of the German minnesingers. A West Coast tour is planned for later this year. The Newberry Consort, Leise reports, “is being heard by more people per program than ever before in its history.”
Yet, in 11 seasons, Springfels and friends have repeated very little, if any, repertory, and the group’s director claims she has barely scratched the surface of the rare manuscripts in the library’s collection. A lavish bequest to the Newberry last year from the late Howard Mayer Brown enlarged the repertory options still further to include what Springfels calls “a pretty amazing French cantata collection.” The late University of Chicago musicologist also left the library a number of valuable period instruments, some of which Springfels plans to feature in upcoming performances.
Deciding what to perform, like most of the consort’s artistic functions, is a complex process that involves input from each member and from whoever may be appearing as a guest artist-musicians like singers Christine Brandes and Ellen Hargis, viol player Wendy Gillespie, recorder virtuoso Marion Verbruggen and harpsichordist Barbara Weiss.
“Usually the normal pattern is for Mary to give us some parameters and send us a sheaf of 20 musical options out of which we are to choose two or three pieces,” explains Minter, who performs and records widely in concert and opera repertory when not appearing with the Newberry group. “Mary does the initial archeology; we are just the dusters.”
“In terms of the repertory we perform in Chicago, we could go on forever,” Springfels adds. “It’s a matter of intellectual stamina more than anything else.”
“One of the things that keeps this group really vital is switching back and forth between medieval and 17th Century music,” says Douglass. “Given the fact that there are no other Chicago groups offering this combination of repertories, it’s important for our audience that we do this. And it’s also good for us,” Springfels adds.
To be sure, the Newberry Consort has experienced its share of setbacks over its first decade. The death (in 1988) of one of its beloved founding members, flutist and recorder player David Hart, was a major blow that forced the others to redefine their artistic mission and relationship to the ensemble.
Likewise, the demise of City Musick (whose director, Elaine Scott Banks, had been a guest artist with the Newberry in its early years) made it more difficult for the Newberry, and other local early-music groups, to establish their credibility with funders, members agree.
Then, too, despite the consort’s success, the local early-music scene has not grown as fast as Springfels and other locally based period specialists had expected it would.
“I had hoped we would reach some sort of critical mass,” says Springfels, her tone turning wistful. “We needed to establish a period orchestra and choir; we needed to create performance opportunities that would give fiddlers and singers and harpsichordists reasons to stay in Chicago. Then the scene would have taken on a life of its own. It would have given us all the freedom to do more things.
“But it hasn’t happened. Yet.”
Chicago needs a conductor who specializes in period-instrument performance, such as Berkeley’s Nicholas McGegan or Boston’s Christopher Hogwood, to put together the artistic ingredients and capture public attention much as City Musick’s Banks was able to do, Springfels contends. The central problem, as she sees it, is that the city lacks the kind of close interchange between early-music performance and early-music scholarship that Boston and Berkeley enjoy.
Without a solid matrix of support, Chicago never will be able to provide period instrumentalists and singers with enough work to keep them in the city. And without that core component of performers, Chicago cannot hope to compete with other large U.S. cities as a center of early-music performance.
As for the future of her ensemble, Springfels turns confident once more. She is mulling over a regular series of concert collaborations with ensembles in other cities, including groups in Washington and Boston that Minter and Douglass already perform in. More recording work and touring are also on the horizon.
“My feeling is there is going to be some growth still, because as the artistic level gets better and there’s more to offer an audience, the audience grows. With more than a decade of Newberry concerts behind us, we have proved that music written before 1800 is not a fad, nor is it music for the elite. It’s here to stay.”
BACK TO THE PAST – VIA DISCS
Harmonia Mundi has been faithfully committing some of the Newberry Consort’s most interesting repertory explorations to disc. Here is the group’s complete discography for that label:
Wanderers’ Voices. Medieval cantigas and minnesang by Oswald von Wolkenstein, Martin Codax and others. With Drew Minter, countertenor; David Douglass, rebec and vielle; Kevin Mason, citole; Mary Springfels, lute and vielle. Harmonia Mundi 907082.
Il Solazzo. Music for a medieval banquet by Jacopo da Bologna, Francesco Landini, Johannes Ciconia and others. Judith Malafronte, mezzo-soprano; Douglass, Mason, Minter and Springfels. 907038.
Secular music of 15th Century Spain (with Johannes Cornago: Missa de la mapa mundi, performed by members of His Majestie’s Clerkes). Same personnel as “Il Solazzo.” 907083.
Ay Amor! Spanish 17th Century songs and theater music by Hidalgo, Falconiero and Salaverde. Marion Verbruggen, recorder; Stephen Stubbs, guitar; Andrew Lawrence-King, harp; and ensemble.907022.
Music for Severall Friends. Lute songs and instrumental pieces by John Wilson, Henry Butler, Matthew Locke and others. Springfels, Minter, Douglass and Mason. 907013.
