Houston Early Music Festival to Welcome Ciaramella, 2/15

Los Angeles-based Ciaramella will perform songs, dances and sacred chants from medieval and Renaissance times as a part of Houston Early Music's 2014-2015 season series. Presented as a main-stage concert for the Houston Early Music Festival, the ensemble's performance, titled "Make a Joyful Noise" will take place at Houston's First Evangelical Lutheran Church on Sunday, Feb. 15, at 3 p.m.

Ciaramella performs on shawms, recorders, bagpipes, sackbuts, plucked-string instruments and percussion, improvising florid polyphony in the manner of the Burgundian alta capella ensembles that piped across Renaissance Europe. The Cleveland Plain Dealer praised the group for performing intricate 15th-century counterpoint "with the ease of jazz musicians improvising on a theme."

"Even though we are playing music that is 500 years old, it is as fresh and new sounding today as when it was first played," said Ciaramella co-director Rotem Gilbert. "The love songs are sultry, the dances are toe-tapping and the sounds of shawms, bagpipes, sackbuts and recorders are irresistible and rousing."

Gilbert and her husband, Adam are the Ciaramella directorial team, and both play recorder, bagpipe and an early form of the oboe, the shawm. They will be joined by Doug Milliken on similar instruments, while Greg Ingles and Erik Schmaltz play recorder, slide trumpet and sackbut, an early trombone. Jason Yoshida will add lute, guitar and percussion.

The term alta capella denotes the loud town bands, or shawm ensembles, that played at weddings, civic ceremonies and feast days during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Like jazz musicians of today, they improvised popular songs.

Ciaramella is known for unlocking the stories behind each composition through historical research and speculative performance. The ensemble takes its name from the Italian shawm and a 15th-century song about a beautiful young girl with tattered clothes but an unsurpassable voice.

The Gilberts are faculty members in the Early Music Program at USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. In 2014, they received the prestigious Thomas Binkley Award from Early Music America in recognition of their achievements in scholarship and performance with collegia and college ensembles.

Ciaramella released its debut CD in 2006 on the Naxos label titled "Sacred and Secular Music from Renaissance Germany," followed by "Treasures of Burgundy" in 2009. Its latest CD, "Dances on Movable Ground," earned five stars from British magazine Early Music Today and was selected as the Editor's Choice, praised for its "expressive fluidity and rhythmic vitality."

Ciaramella will present "Make a Joyful Noise" on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, at 3 p.m. at First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1311 Holman St., Houston, 77004. A pre-concert talk by Ciaramella artists will begin at 2:15 p.m.

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