Music review: Early Music Vancouver's Summer Festival kicks off with a meeting of minds and cultures
EMV’s Suzie LeBlanc hosted a charming exchange of ideas between English tenor Charles Daniels and Vancouver-based Hindustani vocalist Shruti Ramani
Shruti Ramani.
Charles Daniels.
Early Music Vancouver’s 2024 Summer Festival: BACH UNTAMED at various venues through August 8
THE FIRST TICKETED offering in Early Music Vancouver’s 2024 Summer Festival: Bach Untamed series was less a concert than a conversation, as EMV’s artistic and executive director Suzie LeBlanc hosted an exchange of ideas between the virtuosic singing traditions of 17th-century Italy and India. (No Bach to sample here, despite what the festival’s title might imply.)
In a casual, almost informal format, the hour-long afternoon event at Christ Church Cathedral featured conversation and music with English tenor Charles Daniels and Vancouver-based Hindustani (and jazz) vocalist Shruti Ramani, supported by Alexander Weimann on harpsichord and EMV’s 2024 artist-in-residence Alon Sariel on oud and archlute.
Before diving into the music, LeBlanc described how this exploration had been percolating for years, since she had worked with late British tenor Nigel Rogers, renowned for his florid and effortless ornamentation. Apparently, Rogers had mastered the technique with the help of Indian singer Bhimsen Joshi. “Whereas European singers trained first to create a lovely sound, Indian singers focused on flexibility,” she noted.
First on the program was Daniels, with Sigismondo D’India’s “Piangono al pianger mio”, a song from Le musiche da cantar solo. Daniels, in a clear and delicate voice, brought a gulping pathos to the lamentation—a piece full of self-pity, with lines such as “Wherever I go, wherever I turn my steps, I’m the cause of weeping and sighing,” as Weimann and Sariel sensitively followed, improvising their own ornamentation in response to Daniels’s.
A raga, “Naina”, by Ramani followed—a captivating improvisation that showcased not only the singer’s easy virtuosity, but also her clear, confident tone, underpinned by Weimann and Sariel’s drone-like accompaniment. In the discussion which followed, Ramani explained how, by using “neighbour notes” in her ornamentation, she could animate lines like “My heart flutters around like a bumblebee.”
Daniels followed with Lodovico Grosso da Viadana’s “Ardens est cor meum” from Centrum sacri concentus ab une voce sola, and a setting of “Nigra Sum”—an oft-plumbed passage from the biblical Song of Songs—by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger, both of which showcased the tenor’s impeccable control, with florid ornamentation that had LeBlanc shaking her head in amazement from the sidelines. An engaging discussion followed between the musicians about the decisions that go into improvised ornamentation, with Sariel charmingly noting that “sometimes the wrong notes are the right ones—it makes it a little spicy”.
Next, Ramani served up “Kahe Kana”, a haunting raga filled in a poignant melodic mode that displayed her impeccable intonation. As she explained afterwards in a discussion about the “controversial” topic of vibrato, as LeBlanc termed it, the Agra gharana school of Hindustani singing in which Ramani was trained eschews vibrato, which, she noted “seems to obscure the integrity” of the notes. Daniels, too, explained that early European music employed vibrato judiciously—only after the first world war did it start being widely used to project in larger halls.
There was much more to discuss and nerd out about, but the panelists were forced to reel in their conversation in order to present the final piece: a delightful duet that had Daniels and Ramani singing Hindustani note names and sounds in a merging of two distant, but perhaps not so unrelated, worlds. 
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