June 22, 2009 - CLEVELANDCLASSICAL.COM
Apollo's Fire "Come to the River"
by Daniel Hathaway

At the end of ‘Come to the River’, Apollo’s Fire’s latest summer Countryside Concerts production, Jeannette Sorrell had the audience humming along and eventually joining in a southern folk hymn a la Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. Generating that level of audience engagement explains why the series sold out and an extra concert had to be added to the current run. We gathered at the river — or the Lake — for its final performance at the Huntington Playhouse in Bay Village on Sunday afternoon.

Working from her story line about a preacher who moves his family from Pennsylvania to Kentucky during the Great Awakening around 1800, Sorrell has festooned the plot with a rich playlist of early American music (including repertory from the British Isles which became transplanted and in some cases transformed during its own journey to the new world).

Apollo's Fire's very portable production features four singers (Sandra Simon, Abigail Haynes Lennox, Scott Mello and Paul Shipper) and five instrumentalists (hammered dulcimer virtuoso Tina Bergmann, violinist Rachel Jones, flutist Kathie Stewart, cellist René Schiffer, and guitarist & banjo player Gary Stewart, besides Sorrell herself at the harpsichord (appropriately sporting the inscription “Martin – Pennsylvania”), all of whom do double or triple duty as actors — or in the case of the instrumentalists, singers as well in what might be called the big production numbers.

Shipper takes the role of the Preacher, solemnly intoning his words with the over-stressed final syllables of an Ernest Angley, and Mello plays the part of Wild Bill Jones who strays from the family, shoots a man (Schiffer) and is led off in handcuffs at the end of the first act, ultimately to be redeemed and reunited with his fiancé at the revival meeting in the second half. Gary Stewart doubles as the deadpan, unresponsive country bumpkin who gives no information away in a dialogue with Mello. Even the stage manager gets into the act as the Sheriff.

Musically, the production is predictably excellent. The singers appear in finely shaped solos (Sandra Simon notably in the long Ravenscroft-become-Appalachian ballad, There Were Three Ravens), duos, trios and quartets, singing beautifully in tune and approximating in the revival meeting the style of American shape-note singing by bending pitches and sliding into chords. Well-earned ovations followed sets of pieces featuring Kathie Stewart on flute, René Schiffer on cello (a long cadenza following a duet with Scott Mello which suddenly broke into the theme from Mozart’s 40th Symphony), Tina Bergmann’s dulcimer arrangements of Appalachian tunes, and Jeannette Sorrell’s solo set of New England and Irish dances (which strangely popped up in the middle of the revival meeting).

Arrangements of the traditional repertory were shared by the performers and ranged from a cappella versions of vocal music to a bluesy version of Wild Bill Jones and an authentic-improvisatory ‘long hymn style’ version of Amazing Grace. Sometimes Apollo’s Fire chose the attractive over the authentic: in the case of one of the best-known shape-note hymns, Wondrous Love, the ensemble ignored the stark medieval like harmonies of the original for a more accessibly folksy arrangement.

One could argue that Apollo’s Fire brings rather too much learning and refinement to this repertory, which sounds very different when performed by traditional musicians in the location recordings by Alan Lomax cited as one of the inspirations for ‘Come to the River’. On the other hand, this was not (until the final hymn) a hands-on activity by amateurs but a concert situation with highly trained professionals who seemed to have great fun pretending to be ‘folk’ this afternoon.

The two-hour show (including a 25-minute intermission) completely held the attention of the capacity audience and was followed by a standing ovation (with some vociferously enthusiastic shouts from the back of the house). A beautiful afternoon in a barn-like summer theater in Huntington Reservation was the perfect setting for ‘Come to the River’.