Newberry Consort makes fine music with Incantare at Hyde Park Union Church

The Newberry Consort has closed out its 2023–24 season with a program about the music influenced by the life and art of Jacopo Tintoretto entitled “Il Furioso!” The project was a collaboration with Incantare, a group specializing in music from the Renaissance and early Baroque periods. They are a consort of sackbuts (an early version of the trombone) and violins.

One of the joys of a Newberry Consort performance since Liza Malamut has become artistic director is the glorious sound of sackbuts and early trombones. This event was no disappointment on that score as Malamut herself and Ben David Aronson and Garrett Lahr joined forces on Saturday night to create dark-edged, rich sound, yet something more delicate than a contemporary trombone. These sounds alone, augmented at times by the splendid cornetto of Kiri Tollaksen, made for a great evening.

Add to this the refined playing of Alice Culin-Ellison and Even Few on violins along with two of Chicago’s favorite early string players: the elegant Brandon Acker and grandmaster Craig Trompeter on viola da gamba. All these folks together could have entertained a crowd for hours.

But Malamut added even more: a quintet of fine singers. Allison Selby Cook, Hannah De Priest, Reginald Mobley, Matthew Dean and Daniel Fridley all brought top-notch performance skills to ensembles mostly using all or most of the singers together, with a few moments of break-out glory for individuals.

The quality of music making was high, even if the opening number, “Sacri di Giove augei sacre Fenici” by Giovanni Gabrieli had serious problems of balance, which appeared to be quickly resolved.

There were 25 short works on the program, which was divided into several sections: one for women of myth, one for war, one for the plague and so on. Malamut was adroit in selecting music that was both engaging and attractive, and finding a wonderful balance between highlighting the instrumentalists and the singers.

Musically, this was a wonderful performance. But it tried to do more. The program was interspersed throughout with a spoken section, where Matthew Dean served as Tintoretto and Allison Selby Cook was his daughter Marietta Robusti, and they were supposed to be conversing. It was supremely awkward, with the two of them as far apart from each other as the performance space at the Hyde Park Union Church would allow. They read text from lecterns and didn’t even look at each other. Using microphones eliminated any sense of intimacy or immediacy. And as they couldn’t even pronounce one name the same way, it seemed that perhaps they had been given little time to rehearse. The texts themselves were stilted and forced.

These spoken sections took up a good portion of the 80-minute event (about 13 or 14 minutes), and I was disappointed that the time had not been used for music.

There was a large projection screen onto which we were shown paintings by Tintoretto and others. This was probably extremely effective in other venues, but the Hyde Park Union Church’s lighting is awful and it washed out most of the details. Worse, the singers’ heads obscured much of the projected text, making it far less helpful than it should have been.

The Newberry Consort has announced their next season, with details available at NewberryConsort.org.