For the past week Capriccio Stravagante, the dynamic early-music group led by harpsichordist Skip Sempé (OC ’80) has been in residency at the Oberlin Conservatory. Sempé and members of his ensemble have invigorated the Conservatory’s historical performance department with their contagious musical energy.  

On the evening of Tuesday, April 12 in Fairchild Chapel, Capriccio Stravagante joined forces with the viola da gamba duo Les Voix Humaines in the last of a series of mostly French baroque concerts designed to coincide with The Splendor of Ruins, an exhibition of paintings and drawings from the same period at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. The program, titled Amour Cruel, explored the ups and downs of love.

The concert’s most moving and compelling moments were the two viola da gamba duos L’attentif and Chacone raportée by Sainte-Colombe, who is an equally potent composer as performer. Not until Charles Mingus in the 20th century had there emerged a bass-player/composer with such a singular voice. Viola da gamba players Susie Napper and Margaret Little, through their instrumental mastery and musical soulfulness, managed to convey well the spirit of these pieces. 

L’attentif features a constant divergence and convergence of equal instrumental parts.  It is through this dynamic that L’attentif manages to engage the listener from the hypnotic, improvisatory solo viola de gamba opening to the melodically haunting, dance-like ending.  Chacone raportée is a tenebrous rhapsody on a popular baroque dance-form. In this work, questions of form and style become mere surface elements; it is through the elision of disparate emotions that Sainte-Colombe delivers his subtle, personal message.

For a direct visual analogy to Sainte-Colombe’s music, visit the exhibit The Splendor of Ruins at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Like some of the painters represented at the exhibit, Sainte-Colombe erects imaginary ruins on a flat surface; to encounter these ruins is emotionally devastating: deathly calm butts up against hysterical weeping. The end result of this musical alchemy is a powerfully nostalgic experience for the listener.

Tuesday’s program included two transcriptions of instrumental pieces. Les Voix Humaines presented Susie Napper’s arrangement of Les Folies d’Espange by Marin Marais. Because the duo culled so many different sounds from their instruments, the homogeneous texture was never tiresome. Marais’s Sonate à la Maresienne was also presented in a recorder, viola da gamba and harpsichord combination. As a transcription (the piece was originally for solo violin) la Maresienne was not always successful, clouded sometimes by balance problems. Only at moments that worked idiomatically for recorder was Julien Martin’s performance full of the verve and excitement that generally characterizes his playing.

In Tuesday’s concert, American soprano Ann Monoyios filled in for French mezzo-soprano Guillemette Laurens, who fell ill shortly before she was scheduled to depart for the U.S. In the first set, Monoyios offered four Airs de cour, three by Michel Lambert and one by Sébastien le Camus.

The first set was performed as a medley, with each piece flowing into the next. The shifts in mood from each piece to the next were nearly as important as the pieces themselves – this arrangment seemed in accord with the basic idea of the texts: that love is an emotional whirlwind. In these pieces, Sempé’s continuo was sensitive, varied and never predictable. He is a musician equally adept at sounding like a softly strummed lute as he is at seeming to come out of nowhere with dense chordal foliage. Sempé is a musician who is all ears. Throughout the concert he was masterfully interacting with and fanning out into the audience, or reeling in the clouds of resonance produced by the ensemble.

Less successful in the program were the two large scale vocal pieces, an opera scene of Lully and Pan et Syrinx by Montéclair. The Lully scene was quite long and somewhat out of context when cut off from its opera.

In the Montéclair, Napper and recorder player Martin were musical chameleons, dutifully allowing their musical personalities to adjust to the piece at hand. Sempé seemed less enthusiastic; perhaps his musical personality and the tritely Handelian-sounding salon-music of Montéclair were never meant to be.

The piece did include some acoustically beautiful moments. For instance, the viola da gamba’s sound seemed, in textually relevant spots, to emerge directly from the recorder. It was refreshing to hear recitatives that start without any perceptible attack, the viola da gamba and harpsichord entering not together, but at moments that make the most acoustic sense.

Amour Cruel ended with three imitative bagpipe pieces, an Air de Musette by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault that included voice sandwiched between two instrumental Musettes by François Couperin. Particularly delightful was the end of the last piece in which the two violas da gamba held the last note longer than its written value, then simultaneously slid up the fingerboard, like bagpipes expiring.

After the experience the Skip Sempé/Capriccio Stravagante residency should step back from the immediate experience to appreciate the ever-devoted professor of harpsichord Lisa Goode-Crawford for fiercely supporting her students, two of whom (harpsichordists Skip Sempé and Kenneth Weiss) are now important figures in the contemporary Parisian early music scene.