Thu 6/16-Sun 6/19
The Baroque Music Barn in Hunting Valley provided a fitting (if warm) setting for “My Island Home: Songs & Stories,” a nostalgic Apollo’s Fire Countryside Concert about faraway Newfoundland. It featured soprano Meredith Hall, baroque guitarist Sylvain Bergeron, members of Apollo’s Fire and members of the Quebec-based ensemble La Nef.
As Hall explained before the music started, she grew up on that remote island blessed with highly dramatic scenery — ocean and rocks, waves and ships, chill winds and fog — especially fog. The charming and honey-voiced Hall made us love her and consider that we too should see Newfoundland.
She shared songs she learned as a child, gave a short dialect lesson, and donned a fedora and a jacket to add to her impersonation of an old man telling a funny fish story about a neverending squid chain. According to the personable and melodious singer, everyone in her household sang all the time (some better than others, but that wasn’t the point) and music was a big part of life for everyone where she lived (before Facebook, anyway).
Many songs were nostalgic, such as “Lowlands Away” and “I Will Hang My Harp on a Willow Tree.” But others told of a sailor’s life such as “The Saucy Sailor” (who sings that he’s “frolicsome” and that he doesn’t “give a single pin, me boys/What the world thinks of me.”)
Fairy tales were woven into imaginations too, she noted, and these were not the Disney fairies. She sang of spirits as in the “The Pretty Maid Milking Her Cow,” who whisked away her lover: “They vanished like smoke from a mirror/ and straight from this world did depart.”
Oh, for sure, there were instrumental pieces, with airs, reels, jigs — all played with vim and controlled abandon by Bergeron and ensemble members Tina Bergmann (hammered dulcimer), Susanna Perry Gilmore (fiddle) and Kathie Stewart (wooden flutes) from Apollo’s Fire, as well as Robin Grenon (harp), Patrick Graham (percussion), and Betsy MacMillan (viola da gamba) from La Nef.
While the Baroque Music Barn in Hunting Valley is a lovely site for a concert, and the barn attic seems a fitting place to fiddle, sing and dance, the necessity of using a microphone for the voice made for iffy sound at times (especially during tender ballads). It was also a very hot evening and some ensemble members (not the engaged and engaging Hall!) seemed too wilted to smile. I think if we’d heard this program in the chill of winter or if we’d all had a pint or two things would have been even better.
[Written by Laura Kennelly]
Hunting Valley, OH 44022