Horse Ballet ‘Carrousel’ Prances Through Festival

Members of the early-music movement often present themselves as among the most venturesome and independent-minded of musicians and scholars. They are not so much set upon maintaining a tradition of music as they are upon discovering something lost that can now sound fresh and new. At their most original, they are highly creative, inventing as they go, since the actual evidence of what the musical world was like hundreds of years ago can be slim.

Thus, one typically attends the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, the biannual weeklong early-music bash at the university that ended Sunday, more for novelty than for time travel. But the promised highlight at this year’s festival--the horse ballet “Le Carrousel du Roi”--attracted considerable national press because it, anachronistically, promised the latter.

“Le Carrousel du Roi” had been part of the pageant celebrating the betrothal of a 10-year-old Louis XIII in 1612. Accounts of the pageant proclaim a breathtaking spectacle of jousting tournaments and parades of knights, bands of trumpeters, floats depicting enchanted forests, ships, oxen, elephants, lions and stags. Some 200,000 Parisians crammed into what is now the Place des Voges to gawk; the nobility dressed in its more elaborate finery.

Kate van Orden, a Berkeley musicologist, discovered the original music by Robert Ballard and careful accounts of the choreography by Antoine de Pluvinel (the father of modern dressage) for the short ballet, and, with the help of dressage experts in Contra Costa County (just east of here), she attempted to re-create it. It proved a remarkably accurate bit of historical reconstruction. Only the period was wrong--by about 350 years.

Indeed, “Carrousel du Roi” returned us to the mid-1960s, when it was still believed that earnest reproduction of ancient performing styles and staging methods could be profoundly illuminating. But the great lesson of the past 35 years has been that modern ways of thinking about old music, and innovative ways of presenting it, make the best time machine. (The hit of the last festival was, rightfully, Mark Morris’ fabulously updated staging of Rameau’s opera “Platee.”)

Seen at its first performance Friday afternoon (it was repeated on Saturday), “Carrousel du Roi” resembled much more an afternoon of the affluent suburb’s horse set at play. The dusty arena in Heather Farms Park had its attractions--the day was sunny and gorgeous--but no effort was made to suggest the crucial, original Parisian setting. The audience of about 1,000--in bleachers, eagerly snapping pictures and whirring video cameras--was us, not them. Under such circumstances, the fancy costumes by Thierry Bosquet (borrowed from a Brussels production of a different pageant) for the 10-minute ballet looked even more out of place than the more homespun ones for the rest of the 90-minute show.

A band of a dozen wind players on period double-reed, brass and percussion instruments was badly amplified. There were three natural trumpets and a drum on the field that weren’t amplified and sounded miles away, although they weren’t. Our ears told us to mistrust our eyes. If these instruments (and they are naturally loud) couldn’t be heard by a crowd 200 times smaller than that at the original event, how trustworthy are the historic accounts anyway?

Dressage itself is a curious activity. When practiced at the Grand Prix level, the horse magically dances to music, but the music itself tends to be impossibly cheesy. Here, the music was ordinary (and sloppily played), and the choreography, realized by local trainers Creeky Routson and Teresa Trull, rarely demonstrated synchronization to the beat. Of the 12 riders, only Routson and Trull seemed confidently expert. In the ballet itself, for eight riders, there were some beautiful moments of movement, but the complex formations appeared approximate and effortful.

Early music has become highly professional and has genuine stars now, some of whom participated at the festival. But by limiting a single day in Berkeley to groups I hadn’t heard live before, I found that the old ways are not entirely overcome.

REBEL, an ensemble of strings, keyboard and recorder from New York, offered an evening of Italian and German virtuoso instrumental music crudely played. Ensemble Anonymous, vocalists from Quebec, sang works by Machaut, the great 14th century French avant-gardist, with somber pretension.

Both attracted large audiences, however, as did even the King’s Noyse for a late-night romp through music of 16th century France that was a delight of suave, engaged musicianship.

Perhaps the lesson of the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition--jam-packed with panels, exhibits by instrument makers, countless concerts and a fringe festival--is that the past is a big, messy place. Some get lost in it or confuse their egos with history; others find illuminating windows back into our world.