Concert Review of Road to Compostela

Rose Singers Make Old Music Bloom

By Lawrence A. Johnson, Classical Music Writer, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
August 3, 2002, pg. 3D

One core area of classical repertoire largely unrepresented in South Florida's otherwise thriving scene is early music. In the final classical event of its summer concert series, Coral Gables Congregational Church helped to redress the imbalance with a performance by the Rose Ensemble on Thursday night.

The youthful Minneapolis-based group is made up of eight singers and one instrumentalist -- Ginna Watson, who doubles on violin and vielle. With the stage strewn with rose petals, the musicians used the intimate Mediterranean-style venue skillfully, entering and exiting while singing in a processional, with the intermittent rumble of distant thunder adding an evocative counterpoint.

The program, titled, "The Road to Compostela," was devoted in large part to music by that most prolific of medieval composers, Anonymous. The selections came from the Codex Calixtinus, a 12th century monastic collection of songs and stories related to the apostle St. James and to those who made the pilgrimage to view his relics in Compostela. Between the vocal works, the group intersticed narrative excerpts from this "12th century guidebook."

The ironic readings emphasized the violent and weird aspects of the pilgrimage. Read by the singers with a straight-faced guilelessness, they provided a wryly subversive commentary on the proceedings.

The Rose Ensemble members are a gifted group, offering refined, scrupulously blended singing and several fine voices, especially alto Kristine Kautzman and baritone Jordan Sramek, the group's director. The hymns and two-part motets contain much beautiful music, rendered with freshness and buoyant agility in the rising and falling vocal polyphony. The Rose singers utilized various combinations of voices, both a cappella and with Watson's violin support.