Piffaro at Eastern State Penitentiary

Piffaro prefaced the concert by arranging things so the audience had to walk down two long corridors lined with cells. We massed in front of a balcony before entering the prison’s rotunda, while the four musicians on the balcony blasted out a prelude on sackbuts and reedy shawms. The Renaissance instruments bounced off the prison’s stone walls with a heraldic ring, and the walk past the cells reminded us that a prison is a sad place even before we heard the sad songs on the program.

The concert proper began with the evening’s vocalist, mezzo-soprano Maren Montalbano, singing a sturdy "Fortune My Foe" with a slight Scottish inflection. The rest of the musicians entered to a bagpipe version of the same tune, paced by a slow drumbeat suitable for a march to a beheading. The rotunda is a multisided room that could have been a chapel or a public room in a castle with undecorated stone walls — a timeless setting with acoustics that brought out the best in Piffaro’s instruments.

True crime story

The first set opened with two songs that voiced the sorrows of Ann Boleyn, spiced by a touch of anger and a well-timed spoken outburst in the middle of the second. A song on the execution of the Earl of Essex set an imaginary farewell speech to a lilting, folklike melody suitable to a popular figure who was executed because he overreached himself and plotted against Elizabeth I.

With their customary showmanship, Piffaro balanced the sad and tragic with lighter fare that delved into the lives of less exalted offenders. "Jack Williams the Boatswain" faces hanging because he “went a robbing night and day” to buy trinkets for a “false deluding girl.” His misadventures end on a happy note when he climbs over the wall and escapes.

"The Complaint of Ulallia" and "The Lamentation of George Strangwidge" narrate a Tudor true crime story. Ulallia murders her aged husband because she can’t resist George, and George laments that he brought her down. The two ballads are sung to the same tune, and Piffaro neatly interleaved them, with Montalbano alternating with Piffaro’s own tenor, Grant Herreid.

The concert’s fun event was a rollicking "Caveat for Cutpurses" celebrating the lads who practiced the fine art of separating a purse from its owner. The audience took up the refrain on the last few verses, supporting Montalbano with a lively “Youth, youth, thou hadst better be starved by the nurse / Than live to be hanged for cutting a purse.”

Montalbano shifts gears

Piffaro added more variety by alternating between songs and instrumental interludes. Recorders, lute, and harp created quieter moments; shawms, sackbuts, bagpipes, percussion, and raucous krumhorns satisfied the appetite for noisier sounds. Popular tunes popped up in different guises. "Fortune My Foe" served as the melody for the Ulallia and George opus and provided the theme for a winds-and-harp arrangement of a complex, inventive organ fantasy by the Dutch composer Jan Sweelinck.

Maren Montalbano has made an impression every time I’ve heard her, whether she’s singing early music or delivering the passionate 19th-century aria she sang last season in Choral Art’s Puccini Mass. For this concert, she slid effortlessly along a spectrum that ran from the refined style required by two of John Dowland’s lute songs to the music hall delights of the cutpurse’s anthem.

A truly good queen

The scholarship that goes into a Piffaro concert is just as impressive as the musicianship. You’d need an encyclopedic knowledge of Tudor music just to know some of these pieces existed.

The final song was a sterling example. We’ve all heard "Greensleeves." But did you know it served as the tune for a ballad entitled "A Warning to All False Traitors"? That innocent melody acquired a new set of emotional colors as Montalbano delivered a rousing tirade against those who “troubled the peace of England” and plotted against its “gracious” and “verteous Queene.”

The song ended the concert with a stirring, satisfying finale, but I must advise BSR readers that my critical judgment may have been skewed by a personal bias. Elizabeth Tudor is, in my opinion, one of the greatest political leaders in the history of human government. Faced with a nation torn by religious strife and threatened by a powerful enemy, she maintained domestic peace and staved off the foreign threat by shrewd political maneuvering, personal magnetism, and a judicious use of her government’s capacity for violence. I refrained from shouting, “God save the Queen” when Montalbano presented her final salute to Ann Boleyn’s daughter, but it took an effort.