Excerpted from Peter Jacobi's 5/29/96 Review
"BLEMF '96 proved to be a mega event in miniature, a small-scaled but big-hearted celebration with more thans its fair share of highlights. Highlights such as....medieval stories sung by Angela Mariani and David Stattelman...Proof came time and again that musical felicities of long ago and far away are capable of giving pleasure. Beauty stretches and is timeless.
"Remarkable also was the preponderant presence of youth, of young musicians revealing their devotion to history and their loyalty to the continuity of music. As individuals and in groupings, the artists of BLEMF '96 went beyond externalized performances. Instead, they seemed to reach for the atmospheric interior of their music...
"Altramar:
"Add voices to the medieval equivalents of a violin, a guitar, a harp, and a bongo drum, and you have Altramar, a foursome that makes one a believe in music 800 years old, that makes a listener believe these performers just stepped out of a time machine, having been to the medieval manner born...
"Altramar's generous program was built on estimable scholarship. The musicians had figured out the whys and hows of manuscripts from the Carmina Burana, the Abbey of St. Martial of Limoges, the Catalan Llibre Vermell, and elsewhere. Songs of love, songs of sadness, songs of debauchery, songs of joy were shared, all in Latin, the bonding language of medieval times.
"The First Presbyterian Church seemed an appropriate venue for the concert... Mariani's and Stattelman's voices rose to the high ceiling and bounced deliciously back. Each singer was given a major assignment, a musical narrative of scope. Mariani's tour de force was Quisdis [sic] dolosis, from the Cambridge Songs collection, which relates a Faustian legend, that of a young man who sells his soult to the devil so as to wind a maiden's heart. The soprano was, in turns, sultry, mystic, exclamatory, threatening, satiric, dramatic, chanteuse-like, and operatic. Delightful.
"Stattelman, with his mellifluous and resonant tenor, stunningly told the Samson and Delilah story once again, in a version that originated at the Reading Abbey centuries ago. It is a lament that chilled and thrilled, a star turn. A most engaging concert."
Another review of the same concert.
Annddd...Another.
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