The hilarious sacrileges of Red Priest

Red Priest in action.

It's hard not to get a kick out of Red Priest (above), a British baroque ensemble that injects a little 80's metal attitude into the early music scene (I really wish there was an umlaut in their logo) - so no wonder they have a growing following among fans of period performance. Surprisingly, however, they don't much mimic Judas Priest, the "metal gods" their sobriquet recalls (perhaps because they're actually named after Vivaldi, a priest whose auburn locks earned him the nickname il Prete Rosso).  Instead, these Priests favor power chords and lightning-fast bowing rather than the majestically dumb crunch of early metal - so they're really more speed or thrash baroque.  Then again, you could make a case that their costuming, though definitely doomy, also favors the Renaissance-fair stylings of 70's bands like Heart.  So maybe they're thrash-folk-metal-baröque (and there's the place for that umlaut!!).

But whatever their VH-1 antecedents, Red Priest mostly plays their namesake's music; indeed, their funny but frustrating concert last Sunday up at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (in the gorgeous Shalin Liu Performance Center, at top), featured the entire Four Seasons (in a stripped-down version which has become their calling card) as well as La Notte, a less-often-heard but spookily atmospheric concerto (that the Priests played in masks and their best Satanic-orgy duds).  The rest of the concert - titled, appropriately enough, "Venetian Carnival" - was filled out with the usual suspects: Corelli, Gabrielli, and more obscure (but still worthy) composers who roughly overlapped with Vivaldi in the heyday of the Italian baroque.

Indeed, it seemed the more obscure you were, the better your chances of getting a really fabulous performance from Red Priest; they may have piled the stage histrionics on Vivaldi, but they kept things relatively simple for the likes of Dario Castello and Giovanni Paulo Cima (I know - who?), whose gorgeous sonatas were given richly wrought interpretations sans everything but brilliant musicianship.  The offerings from Gabrielli and Corelli were if anything even better - indeed, the spirited variations on Corelli's eloquent La Folia constituted perhaps the most striking performance of the concert.

For make no mistake, Red Priest boasts some serious musical chops - both violinist David Greenberg and harpsichordist David Wright are certifiably world-class, capable of sparkling passage work and sudden stretches of aching lyricism (and perhaps coincidentally, they seemed the least prone to onstage mugging).  But then I shouldn't forget their cellist, Angela East, who is also quite accomplished - and the best comedian of the lot, frankly.  But these three tended to be upstaged in the big production numbers by recorder wizard Piers Adams, who's a bit of a ham, and whose fallback mode is extreme speed (the better to impress us, my dear!).  Virtuosic speed of course can be wildly impressive, but it's rarely deeply expressive (there's just no time for that), and as Adams seemed intent on breaking the land speed record for Vivaldi, we often had to suffer through banging bowing from the string players and shrieking high notes from his smallest recorders.

All this made The Four Seasons musically disappointing, even though there were plenty of good, funny stage ideas in the Priests' performance - which cleverly dramatized Vivaldi's musical scene painting (love-struck shepherds, calling birds, summer storms, etc.).  Watching the show - I couldn't quite call it a concert - I often found myself laughing out loud, but also sometimes wondered, "Can't we have all this and really great music-making, too?"  It's not an impossible dream; when Il Giardino Armonico came to town last spring, they may have channeled Elvis Costello but they played impeccably at the same time.  Red Priest, by way of contrast, may bless their obscurities with some serious attention to detail, but when it comes to the music of their namesake, the elusive consummation of rock-star theatricality and sublime period musicianship remains something devoutly to be wished.

I'm late with my opinion on the new Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport (above). But that's because, I admit, I've been thinking about it quite seriously, and for some time.

Which is what it deserves. The new hall is an obvious game-changer for the Rockport Music Festival, although that's not really one of my famous "predictions;" the game has, in fact, already changed - the Festival seems to have vaulted from the regional to the national stage, attracting performers like Garrick Ohlsson and Midori. Moreover, every single performance in the new hall this summer has already sold out.

Which makes criticism a bit superfluous doesn't it. Still, it's easy to see why the hall has been such a smashing success: its interior is both subtle and stunning, with a stage "wall" that's actually a huge window onto the open harbor - a masterstroke in and of itself - that's only the centerpiece of a lovely interior beautifully appointed in walnut and Douglas fir.

And it's easy to hear why, too: the hall has a transparently clean acoustic unlike anything else in Boston. I'm not sure I've ever heard, in fact, a hall with as sparkling a top and as rumbling a bottom - this building gives great bass, guys.

What's also remarkable is the connection the Shalin Liu somehow makes across the "footlights;" something about the rake of the seating and the carefully calibrated height of the stage seems to dissolve the distance between performer and listener. There's no "proscenium" in the Shalin Liu; perhaps not even a "stage." The hall is intimate in the most literal sense: you feel as if you were rubbing elbows with the musicians.

This, however, leads to the one catch in acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard's design; the space doesn't blend or cast a warm "halo" over the sound; at least on the floor, the hall seems to be simply transmitting the sonic data with unparalleled accuracy to the listener. But what that means is that when a large ensemble is playing (I heard Boston Musica Viva), you hear the music with something like the same balance issues that the actual performers experience onstage.

I'm sure that with soloists and quartets there'd be no problem - and alas, I'm not sure how, precisely, larger groups could address the issue. And to be honest, in any hall, when you sit in the first few rows, you're in a similar situation; Symphony Hall doesn't really sound like Symphony Hall until you're almost halfway back in the first section of the orchestra. So my advice is: if you're hearing a large ensemble at the Shalin Liu, think about the balcony.

Trust me, you won't mind sitting there - the view from above may be even more gorgeous than it is on the floor. Who thought of that giant glass aperture onto Rockport Harbor? Whoever did deserves a Pritzker. (I assume it was architect Alan Joslin, who worked on Seiji Ozawa Hall, but actually surpasses it here.)

Just don't let the Pritzker committee see the hall's exterior. Here a raft of good intentions have pretty much paved a road to you-know-where. The town of Rockport didn't want some chilly chunk of modernism louring over its lovely village square, so it insisted on a neo-nineteenth-century façade - much like what stood on the site before. But the results look a little Disneyfied, à la "Main Street U.S.A.," as this kind of thing often does. My only thought is that the maroon accents of the paint job don't help matters - while a subtler palette could.

Inside, however, things almost couldn't be more subtle. Indeed, the whole thing is to die for, my friends, from the chipped-granite sea-cliffs making up the opposing walls to the lovely, rippling panels that roll into place before the back window. (Don't do that, though (please), unless the glare from the sunset is really too intense!) The circulation is squeezed a bit here and there, I suppose, but at least it always makes sense (and if you're used to Jordan Hall, you'll think it's spacious!). Overall, the hall is a dazzling achievement - and not merely a new venue, but a new standard of what a local venue can be.

Oh, yeah - what about the concert? Well, I heard Boston Musica Viva do a set of early-modern to contemporary works - everything from Ives to Cage to Gunther Schuller, who was there to offer some opening remarks - but I'm afraid this venerable ensemble wasn't really ready for prime time with this particular program.

The concert opened smoothly enough, with Michael Gandolfi's Grooved Surfaces, a set of nearly-whimsical rhythmic aperitifs that the group brought off with panache. It may have been merely standard academic post-minimalism, but it was nice to listen to. Things began to slide a bit, however, with John Cage's Credo in US, a dance score for then-closeted boyfriend Merce Cunningham, which I'd never heard before, actually, but somehow sensed wasn't going too well even though much of it consisted of people literally banging on tin cans.

Composed in 1942, the piece includes not just that canny percussion but also a pre-recorded sound loop - here a scrap of Dvořák's From the New World that seemed to be being broadcast from the surface of Mars. Which was a pretty witty meta-comment on the piece, if you ask me, by Boston Musica Viva (Cage merely asked for "something like Beethoven or Shostakovich"). After all, the work's cheeky conceit is that as European high culture collapsed in World War II, anarchic American force would triumph - by literally banging on cans. Actually, this is a little dumb - a lot of Cage, beneath the music-of-chance smoke and mirrors, is a little dumb. And alas, sometimes conductor Pittman seemed to be cueing effects that just didn't happen - the "radio" operator often looked a bit lost, and the pianist, slightly panicked. Then again, if a Cage piece is played "incorrectly," does it really matter? At any rate, the percussionists generally seemed to know what they were doing, and stayed in synch, and said pianist, Geoffrey Burleson, soldiered on heroically, kind of like the Russians at Stalingrad.

But alas, if Charles Ives is played incorrectly, you can tell, and if anything, the Ives "Five Street Songs" that followed were more ragged than the Cage. I've been lucky enough to hear these performed by the likes of Dawn Upshaw, so maybe my expectations for the performance were a little unrealistic. But mezzo Pamela Dellal simply didn't have the power to cut through the ensemble, particularly when conductor Richard Pittman exacerbated the hall's balance issues by playing the opening number from the aisles. And at any rate, when you could hear her, she couldn't project Ives's distinctive blend of bitterness, rue, and longing. Nor could the rest of the group, actually. At their deepest level, these songs are about the facets of disillusion, but while Pittman had re-ordered them to possibly interesting dramatic effect, he seemed content to coast on their raucous surface. And his players were happy to ham everything up, too. Oh, well.

Next came the Schuller, "Four Vignettes," with titles like "Atmospherics" and "Found Objects," and the usual reliance on such formal devices as complicated rhythms and prettily alienated effects. At least it was short and sweet - although in his remarks, Schuller mentioned he had composed the piece with Liszt in mind. Which only made me wonder what he'd been smoking at the time (I'd like some of it). Fortunately the instrumentalists recovered their composure here, although there still seemed to be a missed cue here and there.

Finally came "Boston Fancies," from Steven Stucky (a favorite of BMV) who's even more of a formalist, and even more in love with "miniatures" - this time of two types, called "Ritornelli" and "Fancies," which were supposed to be strikingly different, but weren't really. Then again, this piece too was short and sweet - and you got the impression Stucky would be doing another one just like it in six months' time. The concert closed with a witty postscript from Bernard Hoffer’s Ma Goose (a work commissioned by BMV for its family programs) which conflated Old King Cole and Nat King Cole to amusing effect. It was probably the most ingratiating performance of the evening, and closed the concert on a high note. But to tell true, the audience left singing the praises of the hall, not the program.