The Folger's Rollicking 'Ballads and Brawls'

The Folger Consort's Christopher Kendall and Robert Eisenstein. (Folger Shakespeare Library)

The brawls came late in the program on Sunday, but they were jolly when they finally arrived: violins, lutes, a bass recorder, a five-foot-long theorbo and a viol -- all jamming as fast and as competitively as they could. In a space as intimate as the Folger Theatre, the energy vibrated.

The program was "Ballads and Brawls for the Bard," the Folger Consort's entry in the city's Shakespeare in Washington festival and, for most of the program, the ballads and instrumental dances had reflected the bard's charming and sedate side. There were familiar settings in restrained arrangements of "O Mistress Mine," "The Willow Song" and "It was a Lover and His Lass" (with its hints of bawdiness), a couple of versions of "Full Fathom Five" and a monster,24-verse strophic "Ballad of King Lear and His Three Daughters" that pretty much did the whole play (mercifully, a couple of verses were omitted).

The Consort directors, violinist-recorder player Robert Eisenstein and lutenist Christopher Kendall, were joined by a number of guests: lutenist-countertenor Mark Rimple, bandore player Jim Stimson and the Newberry Consort, with its marvelous period violinist David Douglass, soprano Ellen Hargis and viola da gambist Mary Springfels. Douglass, playing with a Renaissance-style bow (the kind that looks like an archer's bow) was able to phrase and inflect like a human voice, weightlessly, warmly and without any vibrato. Hargis, whose voice has more body than those of many early-music specialists, doesn't much sound like a soprano, but she sings accurately, intelligently and with a wonderful sense of the text and, in an understated way, is a spectacular showman. Her final sendoff, "The Friar and the Nun," a scatological tale of singing lessons gone awry, was a work of art.

-- Joan Reinthaler