British Trio Prove Masters of Ensemble and Fun

From the treasure house of 17th and early 18th century music, Romanesca, a British trio specializing in this repertory, drew gem after gem Tuesday in the Venetian Room at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena as part of the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series sponsored by the Da Camera Society.

But even better than presenting strikingly imaginative works produced during an experimental age in which composers were breaking rules and conventions, the three musicians--baroque violinist Andrew Manze, theorbo player Nigel North and harpsichordist John Toll--played with such a wondrous sense of ensemble and fun that their obvious enjoyment set up parallel responses in the audience.

To those listeners, never again will the names Giovanni Paulo Cima, Dario Castello or Biagio Marini be wholly obscure; or Alessandro Piccinini and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, mere antiquarian curiosities.

Cima wrote the first violin sonata ever, in 1610, Manze explained in typically disarming and charming introductions he and his colleagues spoke from the stage. It is a quirky start-and-stop piece that intensifies its effects from initial exploratory wanderings through dance-like flourishes.

Hearing the virtuoso demands of Biber’s Sonata III (1681), anyone might reasonably wonder if violinists had anything left to do or discover over the next 300 years, except to make it all higher, louder and faster. Manze soared through the challenges.

Toll portrayed the cool climes of England sympathetically in two harpsichord solos by Gibbons; North, the ever-appealing sunny spirit of Italy in three short theorbo solos by Piccinini.

But even given all these inventive works, the new creative voice of Vivaldi, in which an aching sweetness, uplift and even radiance entered music, stood out. It was heard in the “Manchester” Sonata No. 4, named after the Library of Manchester, England, in which the manuscript was discovered in 1973.

Manze and his colleagues, who were making their Los Angeles area debut, played with such freedom of expression, such living line, such cat-and-mouse ensemble mastery that even the experienced Sites audience was moved to applaud between movements. Who could have blamed them?

The Romanesca musicians played the First Movement of the Second “Manchester” Sonata as the single encore.