West coast met east coast on Friday as AGAVE, an early music group based in San Francisco, brought its innovative HIP approach to First Church Cambridge for Boston Early Music Festival. Joined by frequent collaborator, countertenor Reginald Mobley, AGAVE wove a tale of triumph and tragedy, love and heartbreak, by showing the inescapable influence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on 18^th-century music. “Rum and Rebellion” shed light on long-ignored composers, though some who have garnered more attention in recent years. Each selection revealed structural underpinnings of 18^th-century global commerce in chattel slavery and colonialism. Speaking passionately throughout the evening, AGAVE’s co-director and continuo player Henry Lebedinsky made a strong case for how this music, which reveals inequities of political and economic systems then, holds lessons for us 200 years later.

Such a weighty topic might seem an odd choice for a Valentine’s date night, but many of the songs that Mobley sang touched on love and romance, if not always happy ones. The first half high point came with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s setting of the poem “Chanson nègre,” a popular text in Haitian creole from the perspective of an enslaved man who longs to see his love, Lisette, again. Mobley acquitted himself with particular grace in realizing this strophic song, the melody of which Rousseau borrowed from the Genevan Psalter’s tune for Psalm 42, a similar text of longing and hope. Mobley’s smooth and light tone leant a heart-wrenching sincerity to a poem that painted a vivid portrait of an enslaved person’s despair and loss. With each strophe, he brought a fresh interpretation to the repeated tune. Just before intermission, Mobley continued to tug at our heartstrings with three Modinhas, traditional Portuguese songs of love and heartbreak. With one by Portuguese composer José Mauricio Nunes Garcia (1767-1830) and two by the blind guitarist Joaquim Moanoel da Câmara (ca. 1769-1835), Mobley and AGAVE invited us to imagine a street corner in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 19^th century.

Mixing the sacred with the secular, Mobley sang motets that showed the creeping influence of operatic styles into the 18^th-century church. In Nunes Garcia’s “Te, Christe, solum novimus,” Mobley executed flawless coloratura while showing off his dramatic chops in “Taedat animam meam” a setting of Job’s plea to God by Cuban composer Esteban Salas (1725-1803). Following that, Mobley delighted us with Salas’s “¡Tu, mi Dios entre pajas!” a scene in operatic style comprising a recitative and da capo aria addressed to God. With each offering, we thanked Mobley with louder and more enthusiastic applause.

While Mobley was clearly the star of the show, AGAVE proved more than able as accompanists and as a stellar instrumental group on its own. AGAVE thrilled us with dance music from a 1785 Peruvian manuscript collection, the Codex Martinez Campañon. The dance theme continued in the second half with three dances by Black British composer Ignatius Sancho (ca. 1729-1780). In each dance, AGAVE showed an impeccable sense of rhythm and groove, flawlessly executing complicated sesquialtera rhythms in the Peruvian tunes. While primarily a string ensemble, AGAVE also includes Baroque guitarist Kevin Cooper, whose sensitive and dexterous playing brought a clear Spanish and Latin American flavor to the continuo.

Yet, AGAVE also engaged us emotionally with two serious instrumental selections. They displayed both lyrical grace and cohesive ensemble in an instrumental version of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s motet Pueri Hebraeorum, in an 18^th-century arrangement by Salas. Lebedinsky used this piece to highlight the legacy of Spanish early music in the Americas, which Salas frequently arranged and programmed in his time. Finally, near the end of the evening, AGAVE brought us the deeply searching Adagio from a string quartet in Joseph Boulogne’s 1779 collection “Au gout du jour.” Their individual lyricism and impeccable ensemble held us spellbound despite the growing lateness of the hour.

The closing number lifted our spirits as Mobley returned to sing “Jouissés de l’allegresse” from Boulogne’s only extant opera, L’Amant anonyme. A tale of secret admirers and the discovery of true love, Boulogne’s aria perfectly ended an evening of deep but often conflicting emotions. We leapt immediately to our feet to give AGAVE and Mobley a well-deserved standing ovation. Cries of “Bravo!” resounded as the musicians walked off the stage.

As they returned, Mobley held up a finger as if to say “One more!” and Lebedinsky rushed over to the piano which had to this point sat unused. The group treated us to an electrifying encore of a vastly different style but no less passionate emotion. Mobley left aside the restrained and elegant tone he had used all evening in favor of a much more powerful one to sing Florence Price’s “Sympathy.” Setting a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Price’s song contains the line “I know why the caged bird sings,” famously used by Maya Angelou for the title of her autobiography. The themes of oppression and struggle in Dunbar’s poem are brought to new heights of profundity by Price’s music. Mobley sang with strong conviction and poignancy. Thus AGAVE showed that the 19^th-century message of “Rum and Rebellion” continues to resound. The themes of love and devotion, despair and heartbreak deftly connected the Valentine’s Day holiday with a strident call to action to remind us of individuals whose forgotten stories can tell us much. 

Michael Goetjen, a musicologist, harpsichordist, and organist whose research focuses on 18^th-century opera and the music of Mozart, teaches at MIT and BU.