Piffaro and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society

Ercole I d'Este turned his city into one of the great cultural centers of Europe in the decades just before and after the Italian navigator sailed his three ships into the unknown perils of the Atlantic Ocean. Ercole went in for big spectacles and theatrical performances, like all rulers bent on glorifying themselves and their domains, but he also seems to have liked smaller scale music built around song tunes and popular dances. Most of the pieces on the recent Piffaro program included recognizable, frequently lively melodies. Some of the melodies were even catchy.

The pieces all came from a single manuscript containing multipart arrangements prepared for the duke’s piffari, a band of wind players very much like Piffaro, playing the same kaleidoscope of Renaissance instruments Piffaro plays. None of the songs in the manuscript includes text; the songs were apparently so familiar the players knew the words.

Showmanship and pace

Piffaro packed 26 pieces into a program that displayed all the ensemble’s customary showmanship and sense of pace. For the opening, musicians placed themselves all around the audience and pealed an arrangement of the stirring, heraldic tune The Armed Man. A set of dances composed for exhibitions by leaping, kicking professional dancers followed quieter pieces for recorder, lute, and harp suited for the duke’s private chambers. The three lively dances that closed the program were paced so that Christa Patton’s bagpipe started one galliard just as the last note of the previous galliard ended.

A touch of sadness tinted the opening. One of Piffaro’s regulars, Tom Zajac, is currently undergoing rehabilitation for benign brain tumors that afflict his left hand and arm with seizures and weakness. On the days he received laser treatments for the tumors, friends and musicians from all over the country sang The Armed Man in his support. Zajac is an accomplished multi-instrument musician, like all of Piffaro’s regulars, but I particularly miss his work with the pipe and tabor, that wonderful fairground combo in which the musician plays a small drum with one hand and a three-hole pipe with the other. The new laser treatment, Piffaro advises, “holds out much promise for a complete recovery.”

Silence and spontaneity

For the second year in a row, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society included a lute concert in its offerings. This year the lute player was an English virtuoso, Nigel North, playing 16th-century English, French, and Italian music.

North called his concert “A Decoration of Silence,” quoting a phrase by Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino. North provided the decoration, and the audience provided the silence. The lute is a quiet instrument, suited for private rooms, but I could follow his finger work, with no effort, from a seat in the rear balcony of the American Philosophical Society’s Ben Franklin Hall. Like Piffaro, North varied intricate pieces that require close attention with lively dances and the kind of English works that bear titles like The Woods So Wild and My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home.

For his encore, North produced a surprise. One of our region’s leading early music sopranos, Laura Heimes, was in the audience, and he had her join him in a song. Silence and spontaneity are not mutually exclusive.