Pleasures of “early” music

Augustine of Hippo may or may not have said, “He who sings prays twice.” But the sentiment has taken hold among performers of sacred song, a confraternity to which the lutenist Ron Andrico and his mezzo-soprano wife Donna Stewart proudly belong even as opportunities to make such music seem to decline.

“I think it’s a trend in modern society to try to remove the religious context from just about everything that becomes public,” says Andrico. “And that secularization is, in my opinion, the root of a lot of our problems.”

Andrico and Stewart met in the early 2000s in a small choir that sang for a weekly Latin Mass in Cleveland, Ohio. Since then, under the name Mignarda (pronounced Min-yarda), they’ve released 17 early-music albums to date (18 if you count Stewart’s stunning 2022 a cappella solo disc Veni, Sancte Spiritus: Gregorian Chant Hymns & Sequences). Of those, over a third comprise the kind of Renaissance-era sacred music in which the couple is steeped.

For years, Mignarda self-released most of its recordings and made them available on Bandcamp. (They’re still there.) Then the duo came to the attention of Edgardo Vertanessian, a former live sound engineer for the likes of Taylor Swift, Lil Wayne, Luciano Pavarotti, and the Who. Vertanessian became a fan, sometimes flying to Cleveland just to hear Mignarda perform. Inevitably, he signed Andrico and Stewart to his label Prima Classic.

One result of the pact, besides the increased exposure, is that Mignarda’s latest album covers feature photos of the previously camera-shy couple. Another is that, with an eye toward increased marketability, those albums focused on the perennially popular subjects Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Lutebook) and John Dowland (The Delight of Solitariness: The Lute Songs of John Dowland).

Both Shakespeare and Dowland are close to Mignarda’s heart. The duo has previously released two Dowland projects (Unquiet Thoughts: English Lute Songs From the Golden Age and John Dowland: A Pilgrimes Solace), and Andrico is a recognized Dowland scholar who has published performance editions of the Renaissance singer-­songwriter’s works. And both Shakespeare’s Lutebook and The Delight of Solitariness are works of crystalline, nearly mesmerizing beauty. Neither, however, is, strictly speaking, “sacred.”

Commerce and faith will reunite on two Prima Classic projects that Andrico and Stewart have planned for 2025. As yet untitled, the recordings will celebrate, like Mignarda’s 2008 album Duo Seraphim and its 2016 sequel Magnum Mysterium, Advent and Christmas. In the meantime, listeners can investigate Porch Music, the couple’s just-released second album under the name Eulalie. Stewart does the lead singing, but Andrico sometimes joins in, creating a sound not unlike Peter, Paul & Mary (but without the Peter or the Paul).

Like the first Eulalie album (2020’s Heart-Songs), Porch Music is an acoustic collection of largely traditional folk, blues, country, gospel, and jazz—still early music, in other words, just not quite as early. “We’ve had a running gag,” says Stewart, “that old-time music like what we’ve been doing with Eulalie was our retirement plan.”