PERFORMANCE

The Great Hall at Cooper Union
Anonymous 4 with Bruce Molsky

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Anonymous 4 commemorates the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War’s end. They relate through song the experiences of men and women from both the North and South—the agony of separated lovers, mothers and sons; the fears of those left at home; the death of Lincoln…. It all comes to life in songs long gone or still with us today.

website: anonymous4.com

Concert Program

4-23-15 Anonymous 4 with special guest Bruce Molsky program (PDF)

Artist Bio

Renowned for their unearthly vocal blend and virtuosic ensemble singing, the four women of Anonymous 4 combine historical scholarship with contemporary performance intuition to create their magical sound. Their programs have included music from the year 1000; the ecstatic music and poetry of the 12th-century abbess and mystic, Hildegard of Bingen; 13th-century chant and polyphony from England, France, and Spain; American folksongs, shape note tunes, and gospel songs; and works newly written for the group. Anonymous 4 has performed for sold-out audiences on major concert series and at festivals throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and has made 20 best-selling recordings for harmonia mundi usa.

Review: Civil War Songs of Memory and Loss, at Cooper Union

War anniversaries have kept musicians busy lately. The centenary of the outbreak of World War I was commemorated last summer with a gala concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, followed by a flurry of performances of Britten’s War Requiem across Europe. Elgar, Beethoven and Shostakovich will figure prominently on programs commemorating the 70th anniversary of V-E Day next month.

On Thursday the vocal ensemble Anonymous 4 offered a very different musical tribute, this one devoted to the men, women and children affected by the American Civil War, which ended 150 years ago. Joined by the bluegrass singer and multi-instrumentalist Bruce Molsky, the quartet performed songs, hymns and fiddle tunes from its new CD “1865,” weaving them into a memorial wreath that was fresh, humble and deeply poignant.

The concert was performed in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in the East Village, where Lincoln gave a celebrated speech in February 1860 that electrified listeners and energized his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The show was presented by Music Before 1800, a series enjoying its 40th anniversary this season.

For this program, the members of Anonymous 4 — Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek — sifted through thousands of songs that were in circulation during the Civil War in letters and broadsides, song sheets, program bills and soldier’s memoirs. Their selection includes overlooked gems like Henry Clay Work’s “The Picture on the Wall,” a haunting evocation of a parent’s moonlit communion with the ghost of a fallen son, as well as familiar tunes returned to their original context. Who knew that Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” borrows the melody of the Civil War love song “Aura Lea”?

Anonymous 4, which will disband at the end of the 2015-16 season, has built a stellar reputation on performances of medieval music. The ensemble’s glassy vocal blend, lit up by a tone that is pure without being puritanical, has also made it a partner of choice for contemporary composers. Here the singers brought that same poise and expressivity to their arrangements of backcountry tunes and hymns, some performed in rich five-part harmony (with Mr. Molsky adding warmth to the bass line), others supplemented with instrumental accompaniment on guitar, banjo or fiddle.

If the ethereal beauty of Anonymous 4’s singing ennobled some of the meeker selections, Mr. Molsky added idiomatic immediacy. The most affecting songs were those in which he sang, accompanying himself on the fiddle, as in Stephen Foster’s plangent “Hard Times Come Again No More.” Instrumental solos, including a fiery rendition of the Appalachian fiddle tune “Camp Chase,” named after a prisoner-of-war camp in Ohio, served as a reminder of the therapeutic and soul-sustaining functions of music in times of war.

This music possesses a quality of wholesome innocence, which sometimes sits oddly alongside the lyrics, with their evocations of battleground suffering and home-front grief. But in their measured restraint, songs like “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground,” with an antiwar text by Walter Kittredge, achieve their own poignant dignity, cut from a similar cloth as Lincoln’s speeches. This restrained music, presented here, never fully reflects the horrors of Gettysburg — unlike the work of 20th-century composers, who found forms of expression as brutal as the wars they lived through.