Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 8, 2002:
Music of Christmas past—600 to 800 years past—can speak to us today. All it takes is informed, skilled musicians who are engaged with the music, with one another, and with the audience. Singers Lydia Heather Knutson and Paul Cummings and viellists-harpists-singers Shira Kammen and Robert Mealy more than met the requirements at an Early Music Now concert Saturday and Sunday.
The quartet, known as Fortune's Wheel, offered a banquet of dances and Christmas songs encompassing England, Provence, Spain, France, and Germany from 1200 to 1500.
A group of hymns by the hermit St. Godric (c.1215, English) was a revelation. Tranquil responses in gliding parallel thirds and sixths contrasted sharply and powerfully with ecstatic, florid solo outcries for aid and guidance from Christ and the Blessed Virgin. How much of that ornamentation Godric wrote and how much Knutson interpolated I do not know, but the result was electrifying.
All modern performance of medieval music is speculative to a degree, and Mealy pointed that out in brief remarks between numbers. But instrumentalists certainly improvised behind singers in days of olde. Kammen and Mealy sometimes played in counterpoint with the voices and sometimes played harmonic filler or support.
They were never content with passive background droning. They commented on and played in dialogue with the voices, yet struck a balance and never competed with them. The harps and vielles, by the way, had intense presence in North Shore Congregational Church, the perfect acoustical setting for this program.
The instrumental and vocal dances sounded like folk music. Fortune's Wheel gave them all the heft and eathiness they deserved, but added a professional polish and focus that gave the music shape and clarity. Cummings sang the Spanish songs as if rousing a crowd of pilgrims outside the shrine at Montserrat.
His vocal ruggedness was a nice foil for Knutson's more refined and ornamented singing, especially in the many songs with exchanges between the two. They also blended beautifully with each other and with Kammen and Mealy's voices. A number of tricky, composed part songs came at the end of the concert, and the quartet sang them with great panache. Mealy and Kammen sometimes improvised harp or fiddle obbligatos as they sang.
Not many early music types know how to work a room, but Fortune's Wheel gets it. Their encore was a cool a capella quartet setting of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." They sung it in Latin, and the crowd went wild.
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lydia knutson · aaron sheehan · shira kammen · robert mealy