Remembrance of things past and a plug for the near future, as Early Music Festival celebrates 60 years

Round-number anniversaries decorated the pre-season concert of the Indianapolis Early Music Festival Sunday afternoon. The festival's 60th season counted it as an appetizer, and  Mark Cudek was marking his 20th anniversary as artistic director. But wait — that's not all, as the shopworn commercials say. The concert celebrated a half-century since Cudek made his professional debut  "to showcase my insecurities," as he modestly told the audience.

Mark Cittern had lots to celebrate Sunday.

The Basile Opera Center attracted a capacity audience to its resonant space for Mark Cudek and Friends, a rubric that embraced the participation of soprano Mara Jaffee, baritone Michael Manganiello, and lutenist William Simms. The concert's tantalizing title and subtitle cast a wide net over the carefully cultivated repertoire: "Pastime With Good Company: Politics, Substance Abuse, and Improvisation in 17th-century England, France, and Italy."

The program's breadth and witty presentation were typical of Cudek's knowledge of both his performing craft and his academic and impresario experience. His post-retirement life from 40 years at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore has had the side benefit of allowing more of his attention to be focused on the festival here.

He played bass viol and cittern in "Pastime With Good Company," giving a series of brief solo showcases in selections from "The English Dancing Master" of 1651. It was a rare spate of secular music without an agenda on the program. The agenda may be summed up in the concert's subtitle, indicating that human frailty (some of it cherished) is perennial, from indulgence in risky habits, the attractions of love (some of that falling under those risky habits), and the human fascination with "fake news." 

The latter tendency got vigorous focus in "A Ballad Upon the Popish Plot," a perfect 17th-century forerunner to any number of false narratives that go viral much faster in 21st-century social media. The suspicion that the Vatican had planted subversion in England to suppress Protestantism spread pretty dangerously in an era when word of mouth was enough to raise the popular hackles whenever the time was propitious for hackles-raising. 

Mara Jaffee conveyed the majority determination to beat back what turned to be an imagined conspiracy. After the soprano embodied that controversy's fervor, the baritone (again with a spoken introduction) conveyed "The Resurrection of the Rump," a denunciation of the parliament that in shrunken form paved the way for the removal of King Charles I. The more vulgar use of the word "rump" gets an outing here, and it's crystal-clear whose backside is being swatted; besides, "bottom" relates clearly to the position of hell in the 17th-century mind.

Manganiello had previously invested vigor in a song praising tobacco, which was partnered by one touting smoking's superiority to drinking. On the other hand, the noxious quality of that New World discovery undercut any praise in its behalf with the song "Tobacco's  but an Indian weed,"  which reminded me of the King James who authorized the most famous English Bible and also authored a screed against smoking that anticipated the Surgeon General's report a few centuries later.

The program also had Cudek, with Simms' seasoned assistance, examining the nature of improvisation as a crucial feature of music for string instruments in an era when expertise was admired and taught long before there was much of a professional class devoted to music. 

The movement of the program toward an entertaining conclusion was assured by an ensemble number in which audience participation was encouraged in the refrain. The vehicle was a song celebrating  the execution of Thomas Cromwell, a loyal servant of King Henry VIII who ran afoul of the monarch and bore the ultimate cost of his despotic temperament. 

The modern application of finding joy in a highly placed person's downfall was wisely left to the audience's interpretation. The main purpose was surely to whet the appetite  for the festival starting June 12.