Lusty display of late Renaissance madrigal art at its peak: 2023 Early Music Festival enters its final weekend

 "Musical agent of depravity"? That's how a late-16th-century writer characterized the madrigal, and that's where Les Canards Chantants planted its flag in Friday's concert, presented by the Indianapolis Early Music Festival.

The phrase appears in a program note to the concert, provocatively titled "Sex, Drugs and Madrigals." The suggestion of an unholy trinity is deliberate. The ensemble of six singers and one theorbo player imaginatively staged the program to bring out the expressive heft of each piece. The range of emotions that came to full musical flower in the Italian Renaissance allowed the ensemble to fill their accuracy of intonation, their unanimous phrasing, and unshakable balance with gestures and movement appropriate to the repertoire. 

The point of entry  into the program was a piece by Adriano Willaert, with the "o" added to his Christian name to indicate his stature in his adopted homeland of Italy. The Flemish master can stand for the cross-fertilization typical of the Renaissance and lasting fruitfully into the Baroque period, when transalpine composers also turned their creative attention to Italy whether in person (G.F. Handel) or in study (J.S. Bach).

As an influential teacher, it stands to reason that Willaert's passing in 1562 would spur an outpouring of tributes. One of them by Andrea Gabrieli occupied the second position in a concert that opened with Willaert's setting of a Petrarchan sonnet. The text covers the familiar ground of the speaker having been totally taken over by attraction to a beautiful woman. Such material, and the pull of skillful musical settings, clearly unsettled the religious establishment and pious contemporaries of madrigal composers.

This is the sort of tension that stands behind Les Canards Chantants' program title, "Sex, Drugs and Madrigals," in which the last word stands in for the 20th-century bugbear "rock 'n' roll."  Bass Graham Bier, who contributed the program notes, also spoke from the stage of the comparison and the peril envisioned in the 16th and early 17th centuries from the fashion of lush, sensuous deep musical dives into secular love.

No wonder a composer as well-regarded as Palestrina felt the need to apologize for straying into madrigals from his achievement in sacred music. The ensemble's four men performed a piece titled S'un sguardo un fa beato, with its guarded atmosphere of warning against stolen kisses, to represent the unchurchly side of Palestrina.

At any rate, one of the most explicit liberties Les Canards Chantants took in presenting such a daring selection of madrigals was Gabrieli's Sopra la morte d'Adriano. Singers withdrew a shroud from an armchair placed center stage to reveal countertenor Eric S. Brenner playing possum as the deceased Willaert. 

Les Canards Chantants, a partial representation of the seven musicians on Friday's Early Music Festival program

Brenner's  colleagues performed the lament with its details about life in the Adriatic Sea, demanding that it join in mourning: the fish ("the gentle flounder") and others, as well as the flora. Representation of this life was tossed onto the deathly still Brenner as the performance proceeded. The result was something suggesting the (rarely) tasteful side of the madcap Spike Jones.

If this is typical of the ensemble's style (with one member, Charles Weaver, sticking to his graceful accompaniments on the bass lute), there is clearly no end to staging possibilities of material so rich in imagery. Monteverdi's Lamento della Ninfa brought to the fore soprano Jessica Beebe, lending exquisite depth of feeling to a betrayed maiden's anguish. An unplugged-in old-fashioned microphone on a stand was positioned in front of her, giving the colorful musical setting the aura of a 20th-century torch song.

Among the other highlights in this theatrical-musical blend was the frisky Canzonetta da Bambini, Giovanni Croce's depiction of restless, undisciplined schoolchildren being drilled by a stern teacher (played, with evident enjoyment of the contrast with the nymph, by the soprano).  More innocent fun, at some remove from the suggestive program title but probably regarded as a waste of time by the era's cultural gatekeepers, was a tongue-twisting caprice by Adriano Banchetti, "Gioco del conte," in which competition articulating accelerating phrases ends only with a summoning bell. But that's not before the notorious richness of Italian as a rhyming language has given us in nonsensical combination many a fronte, fonte, conte, ponte.

That kind of intricacy had its serious musical counterpart in Gesualdo's proto-modernist manner of contrapuntal daring in Dunque addio, care selve. That was perhaps the severest test of Les Canards Chantants a cappella security, and it seemed the singers passed it flawlessly. But there's presumably always room for improvement in music of this delicacy and finesse. So naturally the entire ensemble offered as an encore after a Luca Marenzio madrigal its "measure 52 to the end," as Bier told the audience. And to be sure, what had seemed a fine performance in full sounded even better as repeated in this crowning excerpt.