Piffaro's homage to a transformative composer

Piffaro, Philadelphia's Renaissance wind band, celebrated a big anniversary this weekend. Not its own 30th (that's next season), but the 500th birthday of perhaps the most influential composer you've never heard of: Cipriano de Rore, the first to deliberately shape his music to the meaning and rhythm of the text being sung rather than using the words mostly as pegs for constructions of notes. With that change in emphasis, Rore transformed vocal music and made possible the birth of opera in the following century.

The party thrown by Piffaro and guest vocal quartet the Laughing Bird on Friday at the Trinity Center for Urban Life was a multicourse feast, each set of pieces serving as a platter. Cuisine was largely Italian (the madrigals Rore was famous for), with one serving each of French-language music and sacred works. (For a coffee-and-cake encore, the musicians offered their own witty arrangement of "Happy Birthday to You" in solemn Renaissance style.)

The first dish, unfortunately, was undercooked. Laughing Bird sang Rore's "Ancor che col partire" a bit tentatively; Piffaro followed it with an arrangement ornamented with extravagant runs and turns - played, alas, on the one instrument in their arsenal not built to negotiate them: the trombone.

Things got steadily better thereafter: The singers were rock-steady in Rore's sometimes slippery chromatic harmonies, and everyone kept the part writing and rhythmic interplay, no matter how intricate, firmly in place. Yet the tempos all felt similar, and the intense emotions expressed in the texts seemed to be acknowledged rather than explored. For instance, the sleep-themed madrigal "O sonno" sounded wide awake; "Descendi in hortum meum," a love poem from the Song of Solomon, might have been so much sweeter; "Susanne un jour" was too straight-faced for a biblical tale of attempted rape and blackmail.

Some of the finest moments were solos. Priscilla Herreid, fleet-fingered on recorder, made excellent work of an ornamented version of "Susanne un jour;" and soprano Leslie Johnson declaimed, sighed, and caressed the amorous phrases of "Aura soave" by Rore pupil Luzzasco Luzzaschi.

The fun part of the evening was the one you might have dreaded: when the bagpipes came out. But these were Renaissance pipes, less aggressive than the warlike snarls you hear from that guy in a kilt in the park. Piffaro codirector Joan Kimball's fantasia on the "Susanne un jour" tune was just the sort of thing her 16th-century counterpart might have come up with to end a party.