For anyone fascinated by early music, played on period-appropriate instruments, Portland’s offerings are comparatively few, even if you include choral concerts built around antique masterpieces. Timothy Burris, a fine lutenist and guitarist, is involved with most of them. He directs the Portland Early Music Chapel Series at the Cathedral of St. Luke’s, as well as what was once an annual Portland Early Music Festival (now it alternates years with the Back Cove Contemporary Music Festival) at the Portland Conservatory. And if you look at the instrumental ensembles accompanying choral performances of Baroque works, Burris is usually among the continuo players, plucking a long-necked theorbo.

Burris opened the Chapel Series on Saturday evening with “Tombeaux: Le Luth en France au 17e Siècle,” a program that explored aspects of the French Baroque style through its music for lute and theorbo. As the title suggests, Burris’ program was built around the Tombeau – a uniquely French form in which composers memorialized dignitaries and, in many cases, other musicians. The Tombeau was at its peak in the Baroque era, but you can find more recent examples, too, most notably Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin.”

Not that composers adhered to a distinct formal plan when composing a Tombeau. They are more like fantasies, emerging from an opening chord progression. But the earliest known example, Ennemond Gaultier’s “Tombeau de Mezangeau, du Vieux Gaultier,” which Burris played in the second half of his program, provides a road map of sorts. It begins, as do many of its successors, with a slow, graceful chord progression, and unfolds in a series of hauntingly introspective passages that are often less mournful than elegiac – more a celebration of the subject than a lament.

That was certainly the case in the first Tombeau Burris played, Jacques Gallot’s “Pavane, ‘Tombeau de la Reyne.” True, a sense of melancholy suffuses its opening moments, but the increasingly fine detail in the unfolding lute figuration, which Burris executed flawlessly, transforms the piece into a virtuosic meditation.

Jacques Bittner’s “Tombeau” – the dedicatee is not named – is a quiet, attractive piece, if  somewhat less characterful than the Gallot, or others on the program. Perhaps the most striking examples of the form, here, were a pair of works composed in memory of the Parisian lutenist Charles Fleury, who was known by the name Blancrocher, and who died after tumbling down a staircase at a party. A popular player, Blancrocher left no published compositions, so is known today only by reputation.

Of the four known Tombeaux composed in Blancrocher’s honor, Burris played those by Louis Couperin (originally for harpsichord, in Burris’ arrangement) and François Dufat. The Couperin, though written for a keyboard instrument, is a gentle, plangent essay, packed with lute figuration that undoubtedly represents Couperin’s impressions of Blancrocher’s performing style. The Duffat, one of the more harmonically adventurous pieces here, may also offer a clue to Blancrocher’s work, in which case it offers a valuable glimpse at a legacy that survives only in these few Tombeaux.

Burris surrounded his selected Tombeaux with other works from the era, including a pair of lively dances (an Allemande and a Gavotte) by Johann Gumprecht, an Allemande (“L’Impromptu”) and Chaconne by Charles Mouton, and short pieces by Gaultier and Duffat.

In these, all played on the lute (as were all the works mentioned so far), Burris gave polished readings that thrived on the delicacy of the instrument’s timbres. A distinction between the sounds of the lute and the guitar, after all, is that a guitar tone, once struck, remains consistent until it fades; a note struck on the lute has a shimmering, transparent and changeable quality. Burris plays both instruments, but he seems to prefer the lute, and you can see why.

The program also included a group of pieces by Robert de Visée – a Prelude, and pair of instrumental dances from operas by his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lully. Burris played these on the theorbo, which gives him an extended range, with deeper and fuller basses. Here, as on the lute, his pacing, his attention to the details of ornamentation, and the clarity of his counterpoint were exemplary.

But the real joy here was the thoughtfulness he brought to his selection of works, and the degree to which his playing illuminated an assertion he made early in the program, when he quoted harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick’s observation that the contours of French music, more than any other national style, are governed by the shape of the spoken language. Entertaining as the performances were, on their own terms, they also offered a concise overview of a historical style that listeners today don’t often think about.

Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times who lives in Portland. He can be contacted at: allankozinn@gmail.com
Twitter: kozinn