Alba Consort (NEW)

The Alba Consort’s program of Medieval and Renaissance music from around the Mediterranean went over big with a big Early Music Now crowd Saturday night at Wisconsin Lutheran College.

The success had a lot to do with some virtuoso jamming by lutenist Christopher Morrongiello, percussionist Rex Benincasa and oud player Carlo Valte, a late substitution for Haig Manoukian, who broke his hand in a fall on election day. Benincasa also sang some Sephardic and Spanish songs in a lusty vernacular style that made them feel current in both the electrical and historical senses.

All of that made it easier to overlook the haphazard construction of the concert — bits of this and that spread over five centuries — and consistently poor singing by mezzo Margo Gezairlian Grib, who also played vielle.

I wish we could have learned more about the music and its times. The skimpy program notes didn’t help much, nor did remarks from the stage. They could have explained which songs for lute and voice or oud and voice were originally part-songs, with some voices rendered on instruments on this occasion. (A common practice back in the day.) Some songs grew from poems in meters, others from prose texts. Musical meters typically drove the former, while the latter tended toward rhapsodic recitative. I’m curious as to how much actual notation they had to work with in both cases and how much speculative reconstruction they engaged in to make the music performable. It also would have been nice to know something of the social contexts in a program that ranged from Martin Codex (Spanish Moorish period, c. 1230) to Francesco Canova (Milan, 1497-1543). They played a range of genres, from courtly to churchly to street, but they left us to guess at the music’s purposes. We don’t need a lecture-demo, but if we’re doing historically informed programs, we should leave more informed than when we came in.

Gezairlian Grib aimed a more elevated vocal style than Benincasa. But erratic breath support, straying pitch, uncontrolled timbre, overall low energy and careless phrasing dragged down the music at every turn. I can’t recall hearing a professional singer with so many register breaks. That’s not acceptable in any century. Grib would have served herself and the music better by just belting it out, folk-style.

The consort weighted the program toward vocal music, but the highlight of the program was purely instrumental: Morrongiello’s elegant, transparent account of five contrapuntal lute solos by Francesco Canova. What did they have to do with the rest of the program? Next to nothing. But I’m glad they were on it.

Next up for Early Music Now: The Boston Camerata, with members of the Milwaukee Choral Artists, in A Medieval Christmas at 5 p.m. Dec. 8 at St. Joseph Center Chapel.

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