Concert Review of And Glory Shone Round early American Christmas concert
This Rose Ensemble program is a true holiday gift
By David Hawley, Special to the Pioneer Press
The self-describing motto of the Rose Ensemble is "reawakening the ancient." But for some of us, not all of the ensemble's enveloping Christmas program of early American music is ancient.
This transplanted Kentucky boy, reared in a preacher's family, had no trouble singing the old camp song "Jesus the Light of the World" without consulting the lyrics printed in the program. It was the only sing-along number in the concert, but a rousing one.
And Shaker songs like "Harps of Welcome," "Give Good Gifts" and "Pretty Home" were familiar to these ears from visits to the Pleasant Hill colony near Lexington, which is now a Kentucky historic site. Indeed, "Pretty Home," which was sung by the ensemble's engagingly robust alto, Lisa Drew, included the rhythmic foot stomping that sounded like thunder when heard years ago in Pleasant Hill's bare-floored meeting hall. To these ears, it was a journey to a beloved time and distant place.
For these concerts, the Rose Ensemble numbers 11 singers and a small battery of instrumentalists, some of the latter performing on old instruments like viola da gamba and baroque guitar. The vocalists are the soul of the group, with clear, young-sounding voices that seem infinitely flexible and perfectly blended.
So, for example, a vaguely Handelian duet from early 19th-century New England called "Herald Angels" was performed with ringing, round-voiced sweetness by soprano Kim Sueoka and tenor Dustin Wirth. But a few minutes later, those two and the others sounded appropriately flat-toned and edgy while singing "Star in the East," a rural Southern song with almost shouted-out inflections.
Not all of the music on the program is purely American - which says more about the universality of vocal music than anything else. For some of the more secular holiday songs, the ensemble turned to John Playford, the 17th-century English "dancing master" whose collections spread across the English-speaking world like an ABBA platinum classic.
Of the Playford selections, the biggest hit at Thursday's first performance was "Juice of the Barley," a salute to the salutary effects of whiskey sung by the ensemble's three glorious sopranos: Sueoka, Heather Cogswell and Kathy Lee. That came near the end of the performance, before the exaltation in Daniel Read's 17th-century setting of "While Sheperds Watched Their Flocks by Night" and the final sing-along of "Jesus the Light of the World." To leave a concert humming is a nice thing, especially at this time of the year.