Apollo’s Fire @ Baroque Music Barn 06/03/11
Lots of musical fun out in the barn at the Apollo’s Fire concert last week. Not many Baroque music ensembles offer summer “Pops concerts,” as guest director Mark Cudek observed mid-concert. But they should, as made clear by the perfect (thanks be, no rain) summer evening of ballads, country dance tunes, and songs offered in the Apollo’s Fire “Plaine & Saucy: Tunes from the British Isles” concert.
Nell Snaidas brought life to music of regular people (as opposed to music fashioned for the upper classes) through her clear and beautiful soprano that needed no mic (every word was clear). Her smart, sassy, and sexy rendition of the bawdy “My Thing is My Own” showed feminism was alive and laughing even in “ye olde” days. But it wasn’t all cakes and ale as she showed in the touching “Barra Faustus’s Dream” and “The Poore Man Pays for All.” Instrumentalists Cudek (cittern, guitar), Ronn McFarlane (lute), and Mindy Rosenfeld (flute, harp) of the Baltimore Consort joined Apollo’s Fire Countryside players Tina Bergmann (hammered dulcimer) and Kathie Stewart (wooden flutes), and Jeannette Sorrel (harpsicord) for varied Elizabethan lute songs, country dances, popular ballads, and traditional Scottish and Irish dance.
Later this month Apollo’s Fire returns with “Come to the River,” another light-hearted concert that combines an Appalachian barn dance, a trip West, and a revival meeting that they will take on road later as part of a national tour. See it here Fri 6/24, Sat 6/25, and Sun 6/26 at various locations. http://ApollosFire.org.
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.
Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.
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