Consort’s concert is old music, newly fun

LITTLE ROCK — The Baltimore Consort once again proves that just because a piece is older than four centuries does not mean it’s necessarily encrusted with dust.

The ensemble, making its first Little Rock appearance in more than a decade, returned to the music the members formed to perform with a program titled “Musick’s Silver Sound: Heavenly Harmony and Earthly Delight in Shakespeare’s England” Friday night at downtown’s Christ Episcopal Church.

It was just plain fun, even for folks who wouldn’t know a lute from a flute.

Part of the program involved the ensemble’s five instrumentalists - Mary Anne Ballard, treble and bass viols; Mark Cudek, cittern (an ancestor of the banjo) and bass viol; Larry Lipkis, bass viol and recorder; Ronn McFarlane, lute; Mindy Rosenfeld, flutes and fifes, with a “guest” soprano, Danielle Svonavec - in songs and pieces from, quoted in or referred to in Will Shakespeare’s plays.

Tops among these: Svonavec very sweetly singing “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night; “The Courteous Carman and the Amorous Maid; or The Carman’s Whistle,” to which Falstaff refers in Henry IV Part 2; and “It Was a Lover and His Lass” from As You Like It, which sent the audience out into the night with a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no.

Also wonderful: the instrumental “Greensleeves” (another Falstaff reference, this time in The Merry Wives of Windsor), certainly not the version anybody was expecting but with the tune recognizably interwoven between instruments.

The rest consisted of tunes that were popular in Shakespeare’s day - the greatest hits of 1600, as it were - some of which might even have been played as incidental music in the theater. Among these: “Green Garters,” “Earl of Essex, His Galliard,” and the very lively “Howell’s Delight” and “The Buffens” (“Les buffons”) and “Grimstock.”