by Daniel Hathaway
As their name implies, the rarefied music of the French baroque is the pain quotidien of Cleveland’s period instrument ensemble Les Délices, but artistic director Debra Nagy occasionally points her excellent and variable group in other directions.
The latest crossing of genres at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday afternoon, April 27, took Nagy and her colleagues out of the salons of Paris across the Channel to the docks of Portsmouth.
Wielding her baroque oboe and recorder, Nagy joined soprano Elena Mullins Bailey, violinist Allison Monroe, cellist Rebecca Landell, percussionist Anthony Taddeo, and special guest Sean Dagher, shantyman and Irish bouzouki artist, in slightly more than an hour’s worth of rollicking sea shanties, plus oceanic tunes by Henry Purcell, Joseph Haydn, and Maurice Green.
If there’s one thing that the Ohio-based group Alla Boara can do, it is allowing their listeners to explore the past by relishing in the present. And for those who packed into the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, January 24 for the ensemble’s performance celebrating the release of their new record, that is exactly what they got.
You’d be fortunate enough these days to be able to field three sopranos who could successfully channel the celebrated singing of the Three Ladies of the Court of Ferrara, but to find a trio of singers who all happen to be named Amanda would really be pushing your luck.