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.
Sea shanties might make you think of the ocean, not Lake Erie. But the freshwater ships that sailed the Great Lakes in the 19th century held a rich musical tradition of their own. So when Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy found a song that mentioned Cleveland in the book Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors, she knew the group had to perform it.
Navigating dementia — a common, yet devastating part of aging — requires confronting all sorts of complex emotions. People with memory loss, their caregivers, and the medical teams who interact with them all understand this well. So when Les Délices commissioned a piece tackling this difficult topic, they made a special effort to bring the music to those who would resonate with it the most.
“How wretched to forget,” sings the son in A Moment’s Oblivion — a character whose father now struggles to recognize members of his own family. “For all we were forms who we are.”
