With a hey and a ho

Part of my regular listening in my pre-children days included a couple of Baltimore Consort CDs: early music, sometimes featuring a singer with possibly the best name in classical music - Custer LaRue. Despite having the name of a rodeo trick-rider, she had the pure soprano of a boy chorister.

Life with children swept me down other musical avenues, until a Facebook notification last month alerted me to the startling news that the Baltimore Consort would be performing in Victoria. It seemed just the thing to chase away the blues of mid-January, so on a cold and rainy evening, the Resident Fan Boy and I strode up Quadra Street to the Alix Goolden Hall. We found a perch in the balcony above what used to be the sanctuary of the Metropolitan United Church before the Victoria Conservatory took it over a couple of decades ago. It gave us a good view of both the audience and the stage, and I spotted my art teacher in the front row.

Baltimore Consort (founded in 1980) consists of six musicians. Four of them switched instruments seamlessly during the concert. On of them - Larry Lipkis - played both string and wind instruments, including a crumhorn, which looks like a small shofar in reverse. The two "specialists" (i.e. sticking to one instrument) were the lutist Ronn McFarlane, and the soprano Danielle Svonavec.

I don't know what has become of the fabled Custer LaRue (well, actually, she appears to be doing just fine), but Danielle Svonavec, who looks all of 25, sang expressively and even, at times, mischievously.

It turns out she's the mother of three teenaged girls, is the Dean of Girls and the music teacher at a middle school, a cantor at her local Basilica, on top of being a busy soloist with various ensembles and choruses. Oh yes -- she also lives on a farm.

The concert had a Shakespearean theme, grouped in blocks around nine of his plays. Highlights for me: a French dance piece called Les Buffons "The Clowns", by Jean d'Estrée, from a 1559 dance melody book. Larry Lipkis picked up a recorder, and stole behind Mindy Rosenfeld, whose flyaway hair and clothes, along with her kicking heels, reminded me a bit of a Jules Feiffer cartoon.

They did a sort of peek-a-boo, while trilling away in complex runs.

In the second half, a section devoted to Hamlet with John Dowland's "Tarleton's Riserrectione". This was a lute solo by Ronn McFarlane, an elegant gentleman in black, who could pass for the Ghost of Hamlet's father with his silver beard, and is, among many other things, a Grammy nominee. It was one of those moments when I hardly dared move, enchanted beyond words.

This was so worth the walk in the wind and the rain (with a hey-ho).

We picked up their latest CD, of course.