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HOME / A&E / MUSIC
MUSIC REVIEW
For Christmas, Camerata heads to the
Mediterranean
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Anne Azéma, artistic director of Boston Camerata, performed in
“A Mediterranean Christmas.’’ (Simone Poltronieri/Boston
Camerata)
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Globe Staff / December 19, 2009
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CAMBRIDGE - This month of the year many choruses and ensembles around
town favor a kind of yuletide musical time travel, with programs that celebrate,
for instance, Christmas in 15th-century England or 16th-century Venice. Perhaps
the most ambitious of these - in its temporal, geographic, and cross-cultural
sweep -is Boston Camerata’s “A Mediterranean Christmas.’’ This delightful
program is back this year and has been making its rounds over the last week. I
caught a performance last Saturday night at First Church in Cambridge. It comes
to Newbury tonight and the First Lutheran Church in Boston tomorrow
afternoon.
Originally devised by Joel Cohen, the Camerata’s former music director who has
now passed the reins over to his wife, the soprano Anne Azéma, “A
Mediterranean Christmas’’ delivers more than its unassuming name might
suggest. Musical selections spanning seven centuries, and deriving from three
monotheistic faiths, are interwoven to produce a kind of light-footed theatrical
journey through the regions of the Mediterranean basin. The program, for
example, opens with an improvised Arabic taksim, which then seamlessly
dissolves into a plaintive Judaeo-Spanish prayer. A Christian song from
13th-century Spain is pierced by the call and response of both a shofar and a
Turkish zurna. At this year’s concerts, as on the fine recording the group has
made for Warner Classics, the Camerata is joined by members of the locally
based Sharq Ensemble, which specializes in traditional Arabic repertoire.
The musical selections assembled for this program, all of them relatively brief,
include such real gems as “Lux Refulget,’’ an austere and hauntingly beautiful
polyphonic song from 12th-century southern France. Several sun-filled and
expansively lyrical songs taken from a collection dated to the 13th-century reign
of the Spanish king Alfonso the Wise also brought particular pleasure. The risk
for a program like this one is that the journey undertaken comes across as facile
musical tourism. But in this case the research and scholarship behind the project,
the attention to subtle and organic musical connections, and the thematic
grouping of the works around aspects of the nativity narrative gave the program a
coherent frame.
Saturday’s performance itself, while not flawless in execution, was still utterly
absorbing, with the players conveying a relaxed authority as they hopscotched
across religious traditions, ancient languages, and musical styles. Sharq director
Karim Nagi suavely dispatched complex rhythms from his riqq, a fish-skin
tambourine, and his colleague Mehmet Sanlikol contributed charismatic oud
playing and vocals. From the Camerata ranks, Azema and soprano Anne Harley
sang with eloquence and casual poise. As an encore, Cohen announced they
would be performing a Hanukkah song, for which they needed look no further
than their own capacious program: a lively reprise of the Judaeo-Spanish favorite
“Quando el Rey Nimrod.’’
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichelr@globe.com.
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