Music Reviews : Folger Consort Appears at Clark Library

The compact, cohesive program presented by the Folger Consort on Sunday amid the pseudo-Baroque splendors of the Clark Library on West Adams blasted the canard that music of the Elizabethan and Restoration eras must be presented with the utmost delicacy.

Which isn’t to suggest anything resembling raucousness--or its possibility--on a bass viola (Robert Eisenstein), lute (Christopher Kendall) or recorders (Scott Reiss). Rather, these accomplished scholar-performers, resident at the Folger Library in Washington, displayed their wares with optimum rhythmic vigorousness and variety of tone for the delectation of an appreciative Chamber Music in Historic Sites audience.

In place of the usual frail, white-voiced male soloist for songs of Morley, Dowland and Robert Johnson, the Folger offered the substantial, blessedly un-chirpy soprano of Johana Arnold, a fine vocal actress able to project the bawdiness of the ever-welcome Anon.’s celebrated “Watkin’s Ale” with finely nuanced wit in place of the usual nods and winks.

Particularly welcome on an agenda that stressed the wide stylistic variety available within a narrow chronological span were the Shakespeare settings of Morley and John Wilson, which Arnold projected with faultless diction, and an anonymous set of Divisions on an Air, deliriously hectic convolutions on a theme allowing full play to Reiss’ recorder virtuosity.