My first thought, a few seconds into the first piece (“Salve mi Jesu” by Franz Tunder): Zankel isn’t the venue I would have chosen to house this program, a collection of 17th-century German music for viols—with and without countertenor—mirroring the tracklist on the musicians’ 2021 release Lamento. A more reverberant ambience — a little chapel, maybe — would lend the largely sacred repertoire a little more solemnity, offer the secular movements a little more splendor, and wash away any imperfections in the musicianship.

That is, it would have, if there had been any imperfections. Instead, Zankel’s dry acoustic, designed to accommodate both amplified and unamplified performances, spotlighted a totally seamless musical texture. We’ve heard Davies sing Adès, Handel and Muhly on the stage of the Met, but hearing the full range of sounds his voice can make when it doesn’t have to fill a zeppelin hangar was something different entirely: extreme pianissimos, the subtlest and most delicate ornaments and gestures of phrasing, and only once in a while a climactic note so pure and powerful that it made my entire sinus cavity vibrate. We’ve all heard even world-class countertenors (I shan’t name names) shriek and hoot to make themselves heard, but despite these occasional, surprising reminders that his larynx was probably the loudest instrument onstage, he treated it as just that—an instrument—coaxing out of it the most refined and exquisite shifts of color.

Since the pandemic, I’ve spent so much time at home, listening to recordings of programs like this, it’s nice to be reminded that it’s possible to have an in-person experience this rich in tiny, perfect details, using only the archaic technologies of the viola da gamba and the unamplified human voice, rather than on a pair of noise-canceling headphones cranked way up.

But, let’s get back to that seamless texture. The blend and balance between the viols, voice, and keyboard was positively creamy. In the sacred works, Silas Woolston laid down a pure foundation of chords on the portative organ for the other musicians to flex and breathe and sing and sigh atop, and in the secular rep, lively continuo on a harpsichord with a warm, woody tone, giving the subtlest shifts in registration when a section of music demanded a slightly brighter or mellower sound.

The viols—well, look. I’m obsessed with the sound of a viol consort. Played with a bow and shaped a little like a double bass but seated in the lap and tuned and fretted a little more like a guitar, even one viola da gamba has an eerie sound, the frets making each note sound almost as bright and almost as vibrato-free as the open strings on a violin or cello. The movable frets also allow for tunings beyond the 12 equal tones of the modern piano or guitar, lending an almost imperceptible unevenness to chromatic lines depending on the temperament. When the instruments are gathered in a consort of viols in various registers, it adds a mild tang to the tuning of the chords.

In homophonic passages, the strange, sustained purity of the sound makes the gentle oscillation between chords sound like the respiration of some heavenly harmonium, but when the music breaks out into polyphony, the bow allows for each line to individuate more clearly than any keyboard instrument. Fretwork, maybe the closest thing in the world to a famous viol consort, managed both magnificently, as well as such showy tremolos and ornaments as befitted those musical moments that nod to the instrument’s solo repertoire.

The repertoire here, as Fretwork’s Richard Boothby explained in an idiosyncratic program note, ranged “widely over the 17th century, from the early years with three friends of similar sounding names—Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt,” all the way to Johann Christian Bach, Sebastian’s cousin. (Occasionally, especially in the pieces by Dieterich Buxtehude,one could almost catch sight of that other Bach rising just above the horizon.) A few of these composers—Christian Geist, the aforementioned Tunder, and the program-closing, non-German outlier, the Roman-born Giovanni Felice Sances—were known to me only from the Lamento recording and this recital, but they held their own against the more familiar names. That is, if we’re talking homophony, these lovely and affecting works were all shine, no shite.

As the title Lamento makes clear, the program took a somber tone. While you might think of English viol repertoire in terms of consort songs, and French viol repertoire in terms of that sexy Tous les matins du monde stuff, the German sacred music for the instrument tends towards the funereal, as you might have guessed from that other, more celebrated Bach’s uses of the instrument in the Passions. But it wasn’t unrelenting darkness—the program was leavened by the presence of Schein and Scheidt’s danceable suites and canzoni.

Complaints? Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I might have liked to hear Davies make more of a meal of his German diction. The words were clear enough, but wouldn’t you be a squidge disappointed if you bought a ticket in the Splash Zone at a German lieder recital and didn’t find yourself flecked with spittle after some especially juicy palatal fricative or righteously rolled R? Like so much of his performance, the diction was musical, not operatic. And I guess there was a flashy Buxtehude moment where the melodic line flew up above the frets, and the intonation ran out past the cliff’s edge like Wile E. Coyote for just a second before retreating back to safety, but, c’mon, we’re only human. The playing and singing was spectacular all around.

The second encore, Philipp Erlebach’s “Wer sich dem Himmel übergeben,” was of a piece with the rest of the program, but it was preceded by a more surprising choice: Dave Brubeck’s “Weep No More,” arranged by Fretwork’s own Jonthan Rees. By way of explanation for this bittersweet number, Davies invoked Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, the monumental 17th-century work around which he has organized previous recitals. Burton’s tome suggests that the only remedy for melancholy is more melancholy; perhaps that explains why Liz Taylor married him twice. But speaking as a sad, tired, aging homosexual on a cold, dark December night in a world falling rapidly into deepest shadow, I will say that this dose of Lamento seemed to do the trick, at least for one evening.

Photos: Richard Termine

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