Soundtrack for a Titian

OLAF CHRIS HENRIKSEN, LUTE

Concert Room, The Boston

Conservatory

February 13

Last Saturday night, having been misdirected by several liquor store clerks and having run through a labyrinth of dark streets, I arrived out of breath of at the Boston Conservatory of Music for a concert I was determined not to miss. Jumping up the steps, I asked a guard behind the desk the way to the Concert Room and squirmed in just in time. The grandly named Concert Room is tiny, wood paneled and elegant, divided almost in half by a low stage. Some 40 people had squashed themselves into about 60 square feet, backed against the walls or seated on folding chairs. On the stage was another folding chair, a music stand and a lute.

Put crudely, a lute looks some-thing like a small, pregnant guitar. It is has a body like a pear split in half made of between nine and 50 hardwood ribs. Its short, broad neck is fretted like a guitar but ends in a long and sharply angled pegbox. It is difficult to say exactly how many strings a lute has. The strings are divided into "courses," which are either a pair of strings played together or a single string, and different kinds of lutes from different periods had different numbers of courses. This is one of the most interesting things about the lute: because it was constantly changing and advancing, it is impossible to pin down precisely what its physical characteristics are. As manufacturing techniques improved, the instrument became more and more complex. Better access to materials led to a greater numbers of ribs in the body, and new treatments of gut led to a greater range of strings. So the middle Renaissance lute had six courses whereas later instruments had up to 13 or 14. The shape of the body also changed from being almost round in the Renaissance to having a more elongated from during the Baroque period. In order to accommodate more strings, one type of bass lute had two pegboxes, and from this variation developed in turn the orbo and the chitarrone, instruments used well into the eighteenth century.

What kind of person plays the lute? Olav Chris Henriksen is a tall, bespectacled man with a courageous moustache and a demure goatee. Mr. Henriksen is a member of the faculty at the Boston Conservatory, and some of his performances include Tangelwood, the Boston Early Music Festivals and the Soirees Musicales du Chateau of de Versailles. He has also made a concert tour of his native Norway, sponsored by the Norwegian government. It is perhaps unjustly comical to watch him curl his long body in its grey suit and blue tie around the ancient frame of the lute. His sits with one leg over the other, cradling his lute close to him and dipping his head to the notes so that at times his nose almost touches the strings. Despite his height, he seems to bring every part of himself in as close as possible to the instrument, playing with an intensity that draws in the attention of his audience as well.

The music itself is fascinating and intricate. Because of the short strings of the lute cannot sustain the notes for very long, a style was developed in France known as style brise which works by breaking up the notes of a chord instead of playing them in unison. The result is music that is not played but poured. The notes cascade from the strings. chords stretching out, developing and coming back together, voices rippling out against each other, chasing up and down across the bass tones, Lute repertoire covers a wide stylistic range, made up largely of pieces inspired by country dances but also encompassing slower memorial and funerary pieces as well as early canons. My favorite piece of the evening was a series of variations by Jacob Reys on the popular tune Une Jeune Fillette, in which the melody is tossed back and fourth between two voices that seem never quite to catch it. The melody is continually in the air, bouncing like a beach ball on the contrapunctal complexity of the music.

The programme consisted of works by nine different French lutenists from about 1540 to 1700, including the great innovators Ennemond and Denis Gaultier. Mr. Henriksen played two or three pieces by each composer. At the end of each of these little sets he stood up, and moving out next to his music stand, placed one foot in front on the other solemnly bowing over his lute several times. I got the impression that Mr. Henriksen didn't mind our applause at all, and at the end of the concert it took very little persuading to get him to play an encore, a charming Canarie (a dance originating in the Canary Islands) by Ennemond Gaultier.

During each of his pauses for applause, Mr. Henriksen gave some history of the next composer's work, outlining as he proceeded chronologically from the Renaissance to the Baroque some of the changes and experiments in lute technique and tunings. Just as the physical structure of the lute was never static, lute music during the "grand" century was in a constant state of experimentation.

Various and complex tunings were used to achieve different tonal effects, and the move from the Renaissance style to the Baroque was distinctly audible over the course of the concert. It is this that is most interesting in the lute music: its ceaseless movement from one chord to the next, from one style to another. It is music never satisfied with itself, never stationary: It is dynamic and as intellectually satisfying as it is aesthetically pleasing.