DELLER CONSORT: MAKING PRE-BACH MUSIC SING

Early music--roughly, any music written pre-Bach--is enjoying a modest wave of popularity these days. To be sure, it still can’t compete with Baroque and beyond. A recent Newsweek cover, after all, sported a tribute to Bach at 300, not to Heinrich Schuetz at 400.

Nonetheless, such touring ensembles as the veteran Deller Consort have been steadily attracting new audiences. “The early music cult has grown up,” says the English vocal group’s director, Mark Deller. “The pendulum has swung in our favor. It’s now very fashionable to go to authentic performances.”

Deller, 46, whose consort appears at Ambassador Auditorium tonight, senses a change, however.

“Lately, I’ve seen signs of the pendulum swinging back the other way. Some early music series are having a rough time. There’s a danger in groups making music so authentic that they forget they are there to entertain,” he says. “Authenticity is just not of prime importance in my book. One tends to get overly introspective.”

Deller, in a telephone interview from Minneapolis, where the six-member group had stopped in the midst of a nationwide tour, recalls seeing the Authenticity- ueber - Alles movement result in innumerable “dry as dust” performances.

That, the countertenor asserts, is hardly likely at a Deller Consort event. The ensemble has been at it now for about 35 years, and still, he reports, “people tell us, ‘You all look as if you’re enjoying yourselves up there.’ ”

That spirit of informal, joyous music-making is true to the tradition of the consort’s founder, the late Alfred Deller--the current director’s father.

“He had a special communication with the audience,” the younger Deller says of his father, who died in 1979. “Watching him work taught me how important the ability to communicate is.”

One way Deller enhances that performer-audience bond is to place the five singers and lutenist Robert Spencer around a table on stage. “It helps establish a different atmosphere, as if we’re making music at home. And, of course, it also makes us more relaxed.” That sort of presentation “was not customary practice” in the ‘50s, when the elder Deller introduced it.

“We have always tried to draw our audiences into a chamber atmosphere. Let’s face it, our music was not designed to be concert music, anyway.”

The music of the Deller Consort, as is witnessed by the Ambassador program, relies (as it always has) on secular Italian and English madrigals and folk songs. But for Deller, the music he had sung as a youth was the music of the church.

“I started at age 7 as a boy soprano at Canterbury Cathedral. We would perform twice a day all year round--and we never repeated any repertory.”

Later, he was a choral scholar at Cambridge, where he developed his skills as a countertenor, the high range his father had also sung. “I sang in various cathedrals around Europe. In fact, I still sing at St. Paul’s Cathedral, as does Maurice Bevan (the only original member of the consort).”

After joining the consort in 1966, the younger Deller gradually increased his involvement as Alfred was forced by illness to decrease his. (“The voice held up till the time he died,” Deller asserts.)

“It was important for us to appear alive and kicking while he was still around. To a certain extent, it was always in the cards that I would take over.”

How does he sum up what he learned from his father? “I never really had lessons from him,” Deller recalls. “It all kind of rubbed off on me. What I remember most was a magic he created on stage. It made me realize that we are first and foremost performers.”