Ayreheart Treats Greenbelt to a Music Renaissance

Grammy Award winner Ronn McFarlane, and his ensemble, Ayreheart, performed original music featuring lute, fretless electric bass and percussion music at Greenbelt's on Sunday afternoon.

The lute — the jewel of Renaissance courts, the subject of Baroque paintings, and an instrument in King Henry VIII’s wooing of Anne Boleyn — in McFarlane’s hands conjured up an array of visions, as he entertained cafe patrons with the sexy and seductive “Rosa,” the delightful “Chocolate Factory,” which evoked in my mind rivulets of chocolate snaking their way through coiled glass pipes in a Willy Wonka workshop.

“Overland,” with its bluegrass notes, took me away to the majesty of the Rockies, as experienced on a heady drive along the open roads of Wyoming. And “Passemeze,” an updated rendition of a spirited French dance by Renaissance composer Adrian Le Roy, reminded me of the lute’s origins in a distant Near Eastern stringed instrument and its close kinship to the Middle Eastern oud.

McFarlane played a ten-year old lute from the workshop of Vancouver luthier Ray Nurse. He was accompanied on this musical journey by Willard Morris, who played the fretless bass and a mandolin that he had built during high school. Mattias Rucht also provided percussion on a series of small handheld drums, maracas and bells.

In his long career as a lutenist with the world-renowned early music ensemble, the Baltimore Consort, McFarlane explained that he delved deeply into the lute’s extensive medieval and Renaissance repertoire. But recently, he said he has become “obsessed with the idea of creating new music to augment the traditional fare.” It is “freeing to play” original music “from the heart,” he added.

The duality of the lute’s musical character and Ayreheart’s incredible cultural range reminded me of John Singer Sargent. Though the master of elegant stylized society paintings, Sargent also created incredibly free and almost abstract watercolors of Bedouins, Moroccan markets and young women sitting by streams — in which the white of the paper comes through the saturated hues of crimson, cobalt blue, and ochre.

Audience member Brian Voith likened McFarlane’s redefinition of the lute’s capability and range to what Bela Fleck has done with the banjo.

“Snapdragon,” McFarlane’s gift to his son Gabriel, who was four years old when it was written, inspired a family with two young daughters to wave their arms and laugh in time to the music, while Ayreheart’s vibrant encore rendition of “Pinetops” had the audience dancing in the aisles.