Big kudos to Carnegie Hall for bringing Christina Pluhar and her swinging early music band L’Arpeggiata to New York City, where they performed on Friday at Zankel Hall. I can’t remember the last time I heard rhythmic clapping at a New York City concert venue: the audience craftily used it to elicit three encores from this remarkable ensemble and the evening’s vocal guest, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky.  

L’Arpeggiata plays early music with a twist.  While steeped in period performance practice, Pluhar and the band step out, improvising throughout their program in a style that has been described as a “baroque jam session.”  Indeed after many of the solo turns by Jaroussky and the instrumentalists, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wanting to clap as audiences often do after a particularly impressive jazz solo.

The instruments are fun to look at and a joy to listen to, played by Pluhar and her colleagues with total command. There’s a theorbo, a long-necked, lute-like object (Pluhar often lead the group while strumming one), as well as archlutes, and baroque guitars (Eero Palviainen backed up Pluhar with the latter two instruments); baroque violin, played with exceptional élan by Veronika Skuplik; harpsichord and positive organ played by Haru Kitamika; colorful and diverse percussion instruments, including multiple drums of varying sizes and timbres, played by David Mayoral; a psaltery – reminiscent of a dulcimer or a cimbalom – which makes a glittering sound when its strings are struck by small hammers (played by Margit Übellacker); and a cornetto (not to be confused with the trumpet-like cornet), a gently curved wind instrument that makes a sound somewhere between a baroque trumpet and a recorder, played with splendid agility by Doron Sherwin (in its day, the cornetto was apparently highly regarded for its ability to “sing,” ornamentation and all, in the style of the human voice).

I knew in advance that the group would be playing, "Teatro d’Amore", the program for their debut recording for Virgin Classics (a client of our company) – though calling the program a “show” would be more accurate, for each component flows seamlessly into the next, often with little break between the numbers, and all performed without an intermission. It focuses on the music of Monteverdi and his contemporaries, including one female composer, the Venetian-born Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), who was also a singer in her day. The forces that made it to Carnegie (eight people including Jaroussky) were smaller than those on the recording, but in the intimate Zankel space there was no wanting for impact.  

Jaroussky is a superstar in France, selling tens of thousands of each new recording, and he deserves to be one here in the States.  With his clear, honeyed tone, passionate but never overdone delivery, and charismatic stage presence, he is a complete and natural performer.  In two encores, his considerable gifts for comedy were everywhere apparent.  In both a jazzed up version of Monteverdi’s "Ohimé ch’io cado" and the traditional "Ciaccona del paradiso e del inferno,” the first and third encores, he competed with the cornetto player, Doron Sherwin, with displays of showy virtuosity  (think the antics of “Anything You Can Do I Can do Better”). When Sherwin began singing (how dare he!) in the final number, Jaroussky feigned extreme distress and strutted around the stage in peeved high-diva fashion. The second encore moved the action up a few, centuries, with Jaroussky and the group giving us a sweetly affecting rendition of Astor Piazzolla’s wistful “Los pájaros perdidos."

The group rearranged the expected order of the songs and dances at the last minute, so that many audience members were a bit lost trying to find their place in the program-note texts (the final program they performed can be found here). But it didn’t matter a bit. As the music moved effortlessly from the earthy, to the sexy to the sublime, the musicians cast a spell that could hardly be broken.