Waverly Consort Plays Medieval Program

By Bernard Holland, The New York Times   January 18, 1988

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE - celebrated Saturday night by the Waverly Consort at Alice Tully Hall - watched over a century of remarkable change in Medieval Europe. Music was one of them. Wife to two great kings, mother of Richard the Lionhearted, possessor of enormous political and cultural influence in both France and England, she accompanied the French King Louis on the 12th century's Second Crusade and survived 16 years of imprisonment to become the power behind the throne of her legendary son and English king.

Eleanor affected music and poetry in several ways. One was her almost mythic reputation, which inspired the balladeers of her time. More directly, she was a patron of the troubador's art, and her relationship with one of the best of these, Bernart de Ventadorn, is rumored to have gone well past esthetic admiration. She helped preside over the first stirrings of polyphony; indeed, her long life coincided with the flowering of Leonin and Perotin.

The Waverly Consort's small group of players and singers moved back and forth between liturgical music and the secular love lyrics of the day. There were also the songs of Marcabru, Chastelain de Couci and Guiot de Dijon - some patriotic calls to arms for the ill-timed Second Crusade; others, laments over the death and estrangement that followed in its path.

Peter Abelard's ''Planctus David Super Saul et Ionatha'' invested biblical subjects with a very personal sense of suffering, while the troubador songs from ''L'Amor Cortois'' addressed the ironies of love and seduction with an altogether lighter touch. Especially touching was Gaucelm Faidit's ''Fortz chausa es'' - a lament on Richard's death sung eloquently here by William Sharp, a baritone. French New Year's music for the Feast of the Circumcision ended the evening.

The Waverly Consort's company of nine performed with taste and modesty. The singing, though sensitive and delicately tuned, probably only alluded to the music as Eleanor's contemporaries heard it. Paul Rowe's baritone, for example, had all the heft and vibrato of an operatic voice. Susanne Peck's lovely and thoughtful soprano also tended in that direction, but both she, Mr. Sharp and John Olund, a tenor, made more conscious efforts to smooth their modern techniques to a more straightened tone. Larry Lipnik was the countertenor, and the ancient instruments were played by Kay and Michael Jaffee, Adam Gilbert and Rosamund Morley.