A zany spin on musical piracy

Music Review

Red Priest camps it up with mixed results

July 15, 2011|By Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff

The members of Red Priest sprinkled a few Aaaaaarghs! among the pieces by…

RED PRIEST Rockport Chamber Music Festival

At: Shalin Liu Performance Center, Monday night

ROCKPORT - The British Baroque music band called Red Priest recently passed through town for two programs at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. I caught only the second one, but if it was indicative of both, it’s a shame that this group represented Rockport’s entire early music slate for the summer season.

I’m all for clever satire and concerts with a creative theatrical gloss, but this one had neither, though it certainly tried. The program was titled “Bach and the Pirates,’’ a play on the notion that Baroque composers often borrowed from each other’s works or cribbed from their own pieces to create new ones. Red Priest ran with the piracy pun and dressed up in red-and-black pirate outfits, complete with sashes, a feather hat, and periodic shouts of “Aaaaaargh!’’

Even as a musical conceit, the piracy theme wore rather thin. The program was made up of their own arrangements of works by Bach, Tartini, Telemann, and others, presented with what I think was meant to be daring irreverence. Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord was “hijacked’’; in Tartini’s Sonata “Senti Lo Mare,’’ Piers Adams blew into the finger-holes of his recorder to produce faux ocean noises while violinist David Greenberg and cellist Angela East imitated the sounds of distant screeching seagulls. Before launching into Vivaldi’s concerto “La Tempesta di Mare,’’ Adams issued a disclaimer: “This is not exactly as Vivaldi intended his work to be performed, but on the other hand, he is dead!’’ What followed was Vivaldi taken at a breakneck tempo, with the two string players struggling to keep up and adding a muddiness to the virtuosity. In the middle of the last movement, all the players yelled “Ship Ahoy!’’

Red Priest here presented itself as a kind of merry band of classical music outlaws, breaking all the rules, you know, by daring to have fun in a serious business, by tinkering with the music that’s supposed to be regarded as sacred, by jumping around on stage instead of practicing zombie-like decorum, and by telling earthy stories about those composers we all think of as unimpeachable gods, right? It’s an approach that carries its own built-in defenses. If you felt the antics detracted from the show then you must hail from that other stodgy camp, preferring only stone-faced performers who wouldn’t dare bring a sense of fun to the sleepy music of the past. As if these were really the only two choices.