You didn’t have to be a fan of El Greco to enjoy the National
Gallery of Art’s musical homage to the Spanish Renaissance painter on
Sunday evening. (The gallery is celebrating the 400th anniversary
of the painter’s death.) In fact, the concert was more a foil to El
Greco’s thundering religious intensity than a reflection of it, with the
Baltimore Consort presenting a colorful, wide-ranging program of
Renaissance music that was long on charm and cheerfully short on
religious fervor.
Much of that charm came from the music itself,
a collection of secular romances, dances and popular songs known as
villancicos that would have been popular around the turn of the 17th
century, when El Greco lived in Spain. Drawn largely from court
songbooks of the time, the program wove tender love songs together with
virtuosic instrumental works and comic songs from such composers as Juan
del Encina, Alonso Mudarra and Diego Ortiz (and, of course, the
ubiquitous “anonymous”), with superb playing from the consort’s
virtuosi, particularly Ronn McFarlane on lute and Mindy Rosenfeld on
flute and recorder.
But it was Brazilian countertenor José Lemos
who really stole the spotlight. Lemos was front and center for most of
the evening, bringing a light touch, engaging wit and perfect control to
everything he sang, from the flirtatious “Yo me soy la morenica” to
Juan del Encina’s comical “Cucú, Cucú, Cucucú.” The gallery’s West
Garden Court tends to swallow soft-voiced Renaissance instruments —
viols and baroque guitars are no match for its swampy acoustics — but
Lemos set his voice perfectly against the consort players, bringing deep
feeling and a deft, improvisatory freshness to the music.
Brookes is a freelance writer.
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