Consort gives banquet of gastronomical song

Looking for something different to do, the Orlando Consort came to a simple conclusion one day: Everybody likes food. So as good early music scholars, they searched diligently through the dusty archives for gastronomical medieval and Renaissance songs -- all the while eating and drinking in enormous quantities (research, you know).

Out came a CD, “Food, Wine and Song,” whose handsome book-like package includes recipes for authentic dishes from the period. Better yet, one could actually hear the consort perform this colorful, sometimes salacious material in the Grand Salon of the Ebell of Los Angeles on Saturday night, on the Music in Historic Sites series sponsored by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College.

The consort sang virtually all of the selections on the album in the same running order, with one substitution, “Un franc archier,” which was more closely tied with the subject of food than the song it replaced. The main difference was how much further these four British male singers have entered the spirit of the material since the album was recorded.

Their interpretations were livelier and more abandoned, and each set of songs received a humorous spoken introduction. Also the Grand Salon -- a large elegant room in a shoebox shape -- was preferable to the more reverberant space in which the recording was made, clarifying the polyphony of the voices.

Grouped by country, the songs eventually dealt with the earthiest aspects of food and life. Starting with the Italian set, in which every song contained a food object that could be used as a metaphor for a certain part of the male anatomy, the singers cannily pushed the level lower and lower until they arrived in Germany, whose drinking songs inspired them to deliberately -- and hilariously -- lose their equilibrium and pitch. No staid, reverent early music concert this.