MUSIC REVIEWS : Elegant Debut for ‘Musicall Dreame’

A new, locally based early-music group calling itself A Musicall Dreame gave its local debut Saturday at Pasadena Presbyterian Church--it performed in Westwood and Irvine the preceding weekend--in an exploration of the Elizabethan love song. Lots of Elizabethan love songs.

This already highly polished ensemble--with director Michael Eagan on archlute, Mark Chatfield on viola da gamba, soprano Samela Aird Beasom and tenor Daniel Plaster--revealed its enthusiasm for the music at hand by offering a huge supply of it, 41 numbers in all.

What this largess provided was not always treasure but, rather, ample evidence of the genre’s strengths and weaknesses.

By and large the songs, by Dowland, Campion, Ferrabosco et al., were of the popular variety, “ayres” as they were called, songs in which the rhythmical character of the words were expertly set to elegant dance meters and charming melodies while their emotional import was caught only in a generalized, stylized way, and sometimes not at all. The sounds proved graceful, tuneful and, to one listener, quaint. One cannot pretend to have never heard Schubert after all, or Monteverdi, for that matter.

Songs of greater sophistication appeared as well, however, such as Dowland’s “In Darkness let me dwell” and “Can she excuse.”

Soprano Beasom sang with vibratoless purity, fluidity and persuasion. Tenor Plaster offered equal fluidity--some occasional huskiness notwithstanding--and earnest emotionalism. Chatfield and Eagan supplied lush, gentle, breathing accompaniments.