by dan pine
staff writer
Like any good Jewish band, Ensemble Lucidarium plays a lot of wedding and bar mitzvah music. It’s just that the weddings and bar mitzvahs they draw from took place in 16th-century Italy.
Specializing in Jewish music from the Italian Renaissance, the Milan-based ensemble boasts a line-up of 13 early music scholars — who also happen to put on a dynamite show.
Ensemble Lucidarium perform at this year’s Jewish Music Festival on Thursday, March 15, in Berkeley. The title of their concert, “La Istoria de Purim.” (Yes, we know, Purim is over, but only just — and this is one of the group’s most popular Jewish music programs).
One of the group’s members, recorder player Avery Gosfield, is an American Jew who moved to Europe more than 10 years ago. She is married to Lucidarium’s lute player, Francis Biggi.
She says their festival program is devoted to the songs and poetry of the Italian Jews of the Renaissance, including pieces sung in Italian, Yiddish and Hebrew. The centerpiece of their set is a collection of Italian Purim songs.
“It’s a special situation in Italy,” she says of Europe’s oldest continuous Jewish community “Very decentralized. Every small town has or had its own [Jewish] liturgy. You have some from the Sephardic tradition, North Africa, Spanish — and then you have German Jews that came to Italy.”
The poetry connection plays a big role in Lucidarium’s repertoire. Apparently Renaissance Italy –– Jewish and non-Jewish –– was poetry mad.
“The Jews shared the same poetic traditions as the Italians did,” Gosfield added. “We reconstructed these sung poetry pieces, a tradition in Italy since Boccaccio’s time and still sung by peasants.”
(For those keeping score, Giovanni Boccaccio, author of “The Decameron,” lived from 1313-75.)
Ensemble Lucidarium members play a broad array of instruments, from viols and ouds to tambors and lutes. Their show includes liturgical tunes, love songs and that memorable Purimshpiel, albeit with an Italian accent. Many of the Italian language lyrics and poems in the show were originally written out in Hebrew lettering.
Gosfield readily admits the actual tunes they play are pure guesswork. Precious few pieces originally had any accompanying written music, published or not.
“We often work without any information about the tunes,” Gosfield said. “This was our concept: to give an idea of what a typical Jewish Italian family would have been like. It’s very speculative.”
Together since 1991, Ensemble Lucidarium has played all over Europe, the United States and Canada. In 2004 they won an award from the European Association of Jewish Culture for “La Istoria de Purim.” For Gosfield, the group has provided the ideal vehicle to pursue her love of performing and musicological research.
The Philadelphia native moved first to Holland and then to Switzerland to further her studies of early music at the Schola Cantorum Basilensis.
There she met then-fellow-student Biggi, and the couple later settled in Milan. They have a 10-year-old daughter, Lilliana, who now attends Hebrew school. “She’s learning the Italian Jewish traditions that I don’t know,” Gosfield said. “Like Passover songs in Italian.”
The Jewish population in Italy is relatively small, around 40,000, so when Gosfield settled into her new home, she found herself warmly welcomed by the Jewish community in Milan. “Having a family makes a difference,” she adds. “You want your child to grow up in the tradition.”
The Jewish tradition isn’t the only one Gosfield’s daughter has gotten to know. Besides her Jewish and Italian home cultures, Lilliana is also half-American, and her family’s frequent trips back to the States only reinforce that identity.
“She’s watching ‘The Simpsons’ now,” Gosfield notes.
Ensemble Lucidarium performs 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 15 at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley. Tickets: $22-$26. Information: (800) 838-3006 or online at www.jewishmusicfestival.org.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California