Category: Festival-conference

The Pride of Lammermuir

D James Ross at a flourishing 2017 Lammermuir Festival

The Orlando Consort on Pilgrimage
My first concert at the Lammermuir Festival, in lovely East Lothian east of Edinburgh, was the first of two concerts on the theme of the Pilgrim’s Way, a performance by the Orlando Consort of music by Dufay and his contemporaries. The main work featured was appropriately Dufay’s setting of the Ordinary and part of the Propers for the Mass for St James. St James the Greater, the son of Zebedee, was buried in Compostela, and his cathedral there became an important focus for pilgrimage.

Looking back over the whole concert with its motets and chansons by Dufay and songs by Binchois (his close friend and colleague), Ockeghem, Compère and Jean Tapissier it was clear that the Mass was not part of the group’s standard repertoire, and there was unfortunately some distinctly dodgy intonation and a general lack of focus. This was a great pity as the Mass was probably the finest music in the programme – fortunately things settled down a lot in the second half. Particularly impressive were the virtuosic exchanges between alto Matthew Venner and tenor Mark Dobell. As many of the audience remarked, there was something intensely moving about the synchronicity of music and venue – the magnificent Parish Church of St Mary in Whitekirk in which we heard it dates from the same early decades of the 15th century. This beautiful building has an ideal acoustic for this music, and was packed for the occasion. Warm and protracted applause elicited an encore from a slightly later era, Antoine Brumel’s beautiful setting of Sicut lilium inter spinas. Tenor Angus Smith managed the most elegant segue into CD sales I have ever heard by pointing out that Medieval pilgrims liked to go home from pilgrimage with souvenirs, and that we could do the same! Neat.

A Flavour of Vienna with the Quatuor Mosaïques
A real feather in the cap for the Lammermuir Festival is a residency by one of the finest period ensembles in the world, the Quatuor Mosaïques, and their inaugural concert in the lovely neo-Romanesque St Baldred’s Church, North Berwick saw them presenting their core repertoire, quartets by Haydn and Mozart. Opening with the second of Haydn’s opus 20 quartets, they showed the master of the genre already confidently deploying the four instruments with flair and confidence, deftly ending his piece with an unexpected and impressive fugue. Sitting right in front of the performers, I felt involved in the group’s unique chemistry, and was very aware of the purity and immediacy of the vibrato-free timbre of their gut strings and period bowing – violinists Erich Höbarth and Andrea Bischof’s long sustained high notes seemed simply to hang inert in the air before re-engaging with the texture.

Haydn’s sixth opus 33 Quartet finds the composer already firmly established as the master of the genre, expressing himself characteristically and yet definitively through this new medium. The Quatuor demonstrated the supreme coordination and technical assurance that they have developed in thirty years of playing together, while their authentic set-up seemed to give us a direct line to eighteenth-century Vienna.

Listening to Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet K465 with which the Quatuor Mosaïques concluded this revelatory concert, it is hard to imagine the great difficulty the composer professed to have with the genre. The writing is so assured, the harmonies so daring, the textures so innovative that it seems to the innocent listener that Mozart must have enjoyed the same facility as he did in the other musical forms he attempted. The key to this enigma lies perhaps in the group’s encore, given in response to rapturous applause, which was an exquisite little Adagio rejected by Mozart from one of his early quartets – even the contents of the hyper-critical Mozart’s wastepaper basket are worthy of attention. At any rate the beguiling transparency of the Quatuor’s interpretation of the ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, and the unadorned almost raw immediacy of their sound brought us afresh to this wonderfully inventive music. Watching the group play live, one is made very aware of the emotional narrative in which they are all completely invested, one moment bubbling with hilarity, the next wrought with threat or even tragedy. A lifetime playing this music on the instruments of the time has given them an unparalleled perspective on this repertoire, which is why I have entrusted them with the job of being my guide through the Beethoven ‘Late’ Quartets – a body of six ‘problem’ works which I have never got the measure of. Excitingly, the group have just committed them all to disc over the last two years and they were available ‘pre-release’ at the concert. Naturally I invested, in anticipation of more revelations.

The venue for the Quatuor Mosaïques’ second concert was the remarkable arts and crafts style Chalmers Memorial Church in Port Seaton, a maritime church in the style of Pugin with various sea creatures stencilled on every available surface. The Quatuor started where they left off last time in the history of the quartet, opening with the effusive first Quartet of Mozart’s set dedicated to Haydn. Again assurance and invention shine through from first to last, and the Viennese ensemble seemed to have a natural affinity with Mozart at his most imaginative and positive.

Next came a genuine novelty and a nod in the direction of ‘Lammermoor’ with Gaetano Donizetti’s 17th String Quartet – who knew that the operatic composer had composed any string quartets, let alone eighteen?! This is music from Donizetti’s youth, and it turned out to be tuneful if rather formulaic, with occasional prescient forays into a more convincing operatic world, and some genuinely original passages in the Larghetto. Sadly, appearing in such august company, the work came across as rather passé for the 1820s, and even a little banal.

Back to the realm of genius, and the Fifth of Haydn’s opus 76 Quartets. These are works notable for their virtuosic and occasionally vertiginous first violin line, but this held few terrors for Erich Höbarth, whose deft bowing made literally light work of the challenges. This Fifth Quartet is the one whose Largo so captured the imagination of audiences that for a while it was known as the ‘Largo Quartet’, and it is easy to see why this lyrical movement, played with enormous intensity by the ensemble, appealed to such an extent. More so than hearing the group’s recording of the piece, I was made aware of some very odd almost haunting passages, such as the trio of the Minuetto. It would be a real mistake to regard Haydn as in any sense conventional, and the familiarity of the Quatuor Mosaïques with his music allows them to explore every unsuspected nuance. This was another stunning and revelatory master-class in quartet playing, rounded off, after tumultuous applause from another capacity audience, by a soothing Haydn encore. It was salutary to see that even these gods of the string quartet world are human, as they initially started out on two different encores simultaneously – I hope that this rare moment of discord can be edited out before the concert is broadcast on Radio 3 towards the end of November!

The Quatuor Mosaïques visited the charming Aberlady Parish church for their third and final concert for the Lammermuir Festival, ending as they began with Mozart and Haydn. They opened with the delightfully fresh opus 156 by the 16-year-old Mozart – in fact he had first tried his hand at quartet writing two years earlier at the age of fourteen! The set of six quartets written in 1772 and 1773, were composed in blithe innocence of the work of Haydn, and exude an uninhibited youthful confidence. Not without sophistication, they are nevertheless a long way from the later masterpieces, achieved according to their composer through much travail. The Quatuor and the audience delighted in the lightness of touch and effortless whimsy of the three-movement K156.

When the ensemble segued into Haydn’s opus 20 no 5 Quartet, we instantly felt the hand of experience. Written in the same year as the Mozart, the opus 20 Quartets were the product of a forty-year-old mind, and ‘Papa Haydn’, barely into middle age, was still subject to Sturm und Drang and youthful inventiveness, while the fugal tour de force finale of the Fifth Quartet seems brilliantly to be knitting the Baroque and Classical eras together. The Quatuor’s interpretation of this work was intensely powerful, bringing out its remarkable structural devices as well as its sheer élan.

The group concluded their residency by welcoming violist Alfonso Leal del Ojo on board for a performance of Mozart’s K515 String Quintet, which proved to be the highlight of the whole series. Dating from Mozart’s last years, the quintets are a vehicle for the composer’s most profound ideas, and most striking for me was the highly inventive way he used the additional instrument, permitting double imitation between the two violins and the two violas, also creating a faux mirror image of this between the two violas and the second viola and cello. Sometimes it was only the evidence of the eyes that confirmed that there were ‘only’ five instruments playing! It is no mean feat to slot into a quartet already playing at the top of their game, but Mr del Ojo was instantly part of the Mosaïques’ distinctive sound and dynamic. The thunderous applause which greeted this musical and performance tour de force reflected appreciation for the whole remarkable series of concerts. Bravi!

My appetite for the final Quatuor Mosaiques’ performance had been whetted by a memorable recital earlier in the day by cellist Alban Gerhardt in the most exquisite venue so far, the 14th-century Great Hall of Lennoxlove Castle. Against the backdrop of the spectacularly barrel-vaulted and acoustically stunning space, Gerhardt performed the first and last of Bach’s Cello Suites, overcoming finger cramps to deliver magisterial accounts on his full-voiced modern set-up cello. The most spectacular part of the recital for me, and I suspect for the rest of the audience, was his account of the Kodaly Sonata. In this wild music, snatched raw from the Hungarian Puszta and sounding untamed and belligerent, Gerhardt’s cello roared, danced, whispered and rhapsodised by turns. Intensified by the medieval stonework, the sound was magnificent and almost overwhelming. Being able to wander round iconic paintings of Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI, George Buchanan and other luminaries of Scottish history was just a special bonus.

Youth to the fore in minimal Mozart and contemporary polyphony
Although Mozart was only 18 when he composed his opera buffa La finta Giardiniera he was already an experienced operatic composer, and in the Lammermuir Festival performance at Brunton Venue 2 by Ryedale Festival Opera and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Experience Ensemble there was a similar synthesis of youth and expertise. The youth of the singers brought an authenticity to the fraught web of relationships in the plot, while their young voices along with the period instruments of the Ensemble lent the project the ultimate seal of authenticity. If inexperience led one or two of the singers occasionally to fight the rather dead acoustic, on the whole the voices were very pleasing both in solo, duet and ensemble contexts. It was in these latter sections, involving occasionally all seven voices in animated exchanges, that we could hear the seeds of the great operatic ensemble writing to come.

The performers had chosen to sing in English, using a new translation by John Warrack, which ranged between deft and funny modern-speak to frankly grammatically more clunking moments, which due to the libretto’s repetition kept coming back to haunt us. Notwithstanding the added accessibility, I think there is an undeniable case for leaving lighter works such as this robed in the beauty and dignified obscurity of Italian! It would be invidious to single out individual singers for praise, as the young cast demonstrated a consistently high level of vocal accomplishment and dramatic skills, genuinely involving the audience in what is a pretty preposterous story. Very simple staging, acted out in front of the minimal orchestral forces, added to the sense of spontaneity and made for a most enjoyable evening.

Youth was also very much to the fore as I resumed pilgrimage with a concert by Tenebrae in the magnificent ‘Lamp of Lothian’, the 14th-century Collegiate Church of St Mary’s in Haddington. The average age of the performers, already strikingly low, was further reduced by the participation of the National Youth Choir of Scotland Chamber Choir in a work specially commissioned this year by Tenebrae from Owain Park specifically to involve a variety of young vocal ensembles. Melded from a host of related texts and drawing on a wide range of musical styles, Park’s Footsteps had passages of luminous beauty, which stuck in the mind. Both vocal groups blended beautifully, a remarkable testimony to the Scottish choir’s founder and guru, Christopher Bell, who rightfully took his share of the applause.

The second part of the concert consisted of the virtuosic vocal masterpiece Path of Miracles by Joby Talbot celebrating the pilgrimage to Santiago in texts from the Mediaeval “Codex Calixtus” and the Latin liturgy as well as text by the librettist Robert Dickson. Tenebrae under their director Nigel Short have quite simply set new standards for the performance of unaccompanied choral polyphony, and their exquisitely precise and clear sound, maintained flawlessly for an hour, was instrumental in its accuracy and reliability and laser-like in its intensity. Talbot’s piece, bewilderingly eclectic in its musical influences, places huge demands on singers, each of whom is a soloist but also part of a larger blended whole, and this remarkable virtuoso ensemble rose magnificently to the challenge. Unfortunately, in the final sections of the work a whistling hearing aid in the audience clearly disturbed the singers and one or two of the audience, including me. As audiences age, this is a growing problem, and a very thorny one to address – naturally hearing aid users have the right fully to hear the music, but equally so do performers and other audience members.

As the singers moved portentously round the building, as if enacting some profound liturgical drama, it struck me that pieces like this, interweaving ancient liturgies, pilgrims’ song and world music, are creating new pseudo liturgies for our post-religious times – spiritual experiences facilitated without the inconvenience of faith or even belief. It is ironic that as church attendance and religious faith generally have declined, the public appetite for abstract spiritual experiences has rocketed, a fact underlined by the thunderous response to Tenebrae’s masterly performance.

Dunedin Consort provides a grand finale
The finale to the 2017 Lammermuir Festival was grand in every sense, being an impressive performance of Handel’s youthful oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, composed in 1707 during the 21-year-old’s Italian visit. Notwithstanding the rather conservative text in which stylised characters vie with one another, this early oratorio is not all it seems. In fact, the young Handel is warming up for his stellar career as an operatic composer, while the seemingly emblematic figures in fact interact like operatic characters. Already a gifted and experienced composer, Handel audibly delights in the forces at his disposal and is never musically more creative and imaginative than he is here. The sheer confidence of some of the musical ideas is stunning, while from the arch-recycler we also hear the roots of much later repertoire, including an almost perfectly formed prototype of the iconic ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, given a ravishing performance by Emile Renard as Piacere, originally a role for male soprano. Renard also stunned us all with her virtuosic aria ‘Come nembo’, while fellow soprano, the crystal-toned Joanne Lunn, gave an exquisite account of the part of Bellezza. Nicholas Mulroy and Hilary Summers seemed perhaps less ideally vocally cast as Tempo and Disinganno, but gave heartfelt accounts of their generally darker music.

Equally impressive was the playing of the Dunedin Consort’s Baroque orchestra, from which emerged superb solo contributions by principal oboist Alexandra Bellamy, leader Cecilia Bernardini, organist Stephen Farr and principal cellist Alison McGillivray. Under the direction of John Butt, both the vocal and instrumental forces exuded Baroque expression, while wonderfully authentic and thrilling ornamentation provided the icing on the cake. This gala evening playing to a packed St Mary’s Collegiate Church Haddington picked up on several of the themes of this year’s Lammermuir Festival, not least the theme of youth which had run like a thread through the programme. Although it is so much more than this, the Lammermuir Festival has become one of the most important platforms for early music in Scotland or for that matter the UK. After a week of superlative international performances in lovely and atmospheric settings I can see why it has attracted such accolades and continues to enjoy such success. And perhaps the ultimate accolade – at the first concert I attended, the Orlando Consort’s Pilgrim’s Way, I spoke to a member of the audience about why she had come. She knew nothing of 15th-century polyphony, but said she ‘trusted the Festival’ and had been utterly beguiled by the synergy of music and venue. Surely this is what festivals should ultimately be all about!

Sincere and profound apologies to James, the festival and the artists for the long overdue uploading of this review; somehow it was filed and forgotten about.

Tags Baroque, Classical. Romantic, Festival, Medieval, Renaissance

Festival-conference

Mainly Early Nights in Orkney

Post author By EMR2015
Post date July 7, 2018
1 Comment on Mainly Early Nights in Orkney

D James Ross at the 2018 St Magnus International Festival in Orkney

Sonoro, Rachmaninov Vespers, St Magnus Cathedral
In his opening comments to the 2018 St Magnus International Festival in Orkney, Festival Director Alasdair Nicolson emphasised the need for constant innovation, and indeed a glance through the Festival programme revealed a stimulating selection of contemporary and early chamber music events – perhaps in this respect suggesting a return to the original aims of the event. Having said that, the Festival opened with the Rachmaninov Vespers, a work which could now be regarded as decidedly mainstream. More properly termed the All-Night Vigil, this work nowadays enjoys a degree popularity its composer could hardly have dreamed of, and the choral ensemble Sonoro, founded by their director Neil Ferris in 2016, seemed to have no difficulty in filling St Magnus Cathedral for their performance. But why you may be asking have I included it in my review of early music? Sonoro is by no means an ‘early music’ choir – indeed their group notes declare the aim that ‘each singer be free to use all of their voice.’ The resulting full, dynamically varied sound includes a degree of vibrato, particularly at the upper end, and an element of the operatic. But what could be more authentic for a performance of Rachmaninov? The performance omitted Rachmaninov’s settings of ‘Amen’, which open two of the numbers, thereby neatly sidestepping the issue that Rachmaninov seems to have intended that his work be performed liturgically in sections and in a context of harmonised chant, for which the ‘Amens’ provide a conclusion. On the other hand, the programme notes provided an evocative outline of the liturgical context in which the music belongs. Two wonderfully idiomatic soloists helped to set the scene, while the almost opaque wall-of-sound of the loudest passages contrasted magically with hushed episodes, all moving under Ferris’s direction with an impressive blend and unanimity. If just occasionally the distinctive writing for contrabasses (the distinctive Russian Oktavists) seemed a little under-powered, relying on a single voice, this was a thoroughly convincing performance which brought out the subtle nuances as well as the sheer raw Russian power of Rachmaninov’s remarkable choral masterpiece.

Aarhus Sommeropera & the Danish Sinfonietta, Telemann Pimpinone, The Orkney Theatre
Danish ribaldry was to the fore in Aarhus Sommeropera and the Danish Sinfonietta’s performance of Telemann’s comic opera Pimpinone in Kirkwall’s magnificent new Orkney Theatre. Sung in a racy new English translation by Christopher Cowell, the sexy maid Vespetta, vivaciously portrayed by Berit Berfred-Jensen, had to outmanoeuvre a computer nerd Pimpinone, played with credible techy awkwardness by Jesper Mikkelsen, kitted out with horrendous ‘Denis Healey’ eyebrows. Both performers proved expert vocalists, giving a sparkling account of Telemann’s witty and fast-moving score. From the huge Baroque frock which parted to reveal Vespetta in scene 1, Jan Magaard’s direction and Ivar Gjerøp’s design, with some witty back-projection also moved slickly and imaginatively, coping as well as can be reasonably expected with the standard modern issue of Baroque comic opera – a surfeit of music and limited action and narrative drive. (Might it have been worth considering not slavishly singing da capos of every single aria?)

The strings of the Danish Sinfonietta under the detailed direction of David Riddell provided able and highly sympathetic support, as well as contributing appropriate instrumental episodes. Telemann had composed his comic opera as an interval entertainment between the acts of Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano, but in the way of such things it was the interlude which caught the public imagination, and soon it was being played on its own. To accommodate this new circumstance, the ever-versatile Telemann instructed that instrumental music be played between the three scenes, and in this performance the Danish Sinfonietta obliged with Telemann’s D major Violin Concerto, which the composer had written for the intervals of Richard Keiser’s opera seria Nebucadnezar. The solo part was played in beautifully authentic Baroque style by Mo Yi, who reprised her winning account of the work in the Sinfonietta’s two concerts later in the Festival. Incidentally, the Sinfonietta’s delightful recital in the Cromarty Hall in charming St Margaret’s Hope also featured two fine arias, which Telemann had composed for interpolation into his production of Keiser’s Nebucadnezar. Operatic composition is one of the few aspects of Telemann’s career which has not yet received its due attention in modern times, and Aarhus Sommeropera and the Danish Sinfonietta have made a convincing case for his operas being brought more generally into the spotlight.

Ensemble Perpetuo, Goldberg Variations plus, St Magnus Cathedral
Late-night concerts in the magnificent 12th-century Cathedral of St Magnus featuring esoteric repertoire have become a feature of the Festival, and my next concert was a performance by Ensemble Perpetuo of the string trio arrangement by Dmitri Sitkovetsky of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. This was preceded by a sequence of five freshly commissioned works by contemporary composers, inspired by the Bach – highlights for me were a toe-tapping reel by Alasdair Nicolson and a beguiling lullaby by Donald Grant, which led movingly and seamlessly into the Goldberg Aria. The Bach drew considerable virtuosity from violinist Fenella Humphreys, violist Simon Tandrëe and cellist Cara Berridge, but the decision to play the whole programme as one continuous span placed huge demands of stamina and concentration on all three, and occasionally the intonation suffered a little. However, the commendably authentic Baroque approach to the Bach, with minimal vibrato and tasteful ornamentation, made this a very powerful cumulative experience, enhanced as we walked out of the Cathedral well after 11pm into a magically light Orkney summer night.

The Alehouse Sessions, Barokksolistene, Stromness Town Hall
The Barokksolistene is a remarkable ensemble, who under the direction of Bjarte Eike stage highly animated period instrument performances of Baroque music. Their three presentations at the Festival proved to be nothing less than mesmerising, a thoroughly integrated blend of top quality authentic performance (all played from memory), theatre, dance, story-telling and thematic deconstruction. Their first show in Stromness Town Hall, The Alehouse Sessions, took as its thesis the fact that with the advent of the Cromwellian Commonwealth court and theatre musicians deprived of employment took to taverns where they played and sang for a new audience. Drawing on popular material, particularly from Playford’s Dancing Master and Purcell’s compositions as well as music by Neil Gow, they gave extended treatments on ensembles of stringed instruments, strutting all the while around the stage like rock stars. Steven Player stepped out of the ensemble to present a series of stunning period dances, while Thomas Guthrie put down his Baroque violin to sing a few songs with a very pleasing voice, while inhabiting utterly and passionately the texts he was singing. With more than a passing resemblance to comedian Harry Hill, the multitalented Guthrie held the audience spellbound. This wonderfully organic performance, ranging from the deeply touching to the downright bawdy, ended appropriately enough with an ingenious slow-motion tavern brawl!

Purcell’s Playground, Barokksolistene, St Magnus Cathedral
Their next performance in St Magnus Cathedral saw them bring a little more decorum to the music of Purcell. More superb playing, wonderful singing and dynamic dancing, but this time something quite intriguing – a Purcell air was slowly deconstructed as the players moved off the stage and moved around the cathedral, before both music and ensemble moved back into place again. It has to be said not everyone was convinced by this radical approach to early music, and I would have to mention the modern string bass and modern percussion, which appeared side-by-side with the authentic gut-strung violins, viola and cello and baroque guitars and portative organ/ harpsichord, but I have to say I was completely won over. As with all three concerts, the price of a wonderful spontaneity was some ambiguity as to just what was being performed – I gathered from one of the group members that the ensemble have around three hours of music in reserve for an hour-long concert from which the programme is selected on the night. When I asked how they managed to hold in mind all the scores as well as complex choreography and a number of other tricks, such as the risky trick of freezing and then resuming in complete unanimity, my ‘mole’ simply and modestly told me they had been playing it all for a long time! In addition to the tour de force of the remarkably deconstructed piece, I was also moved almost to tears by the group’s account of the C-minor Fantasia no 7 where each passing discord was unbearably heartfelt in a way I have never experienced before.

Tall Ship Tunes, Barokksolistene, Statsraad Lehmkuhl
The venue for the group’s third concert had impressively arrived in Kirkwall Harbour just two hours before the concert – it was the magnificent Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl! Recalling the Festival’s declared mission of innovation, to secure the participation of this wonderfully relevant venue for a programme by the Barokksolistene of Tall Ship Tunes was a real coup. Employing their customary heady blend of dance, song and instrumental music, the group performed sea shanties, hornpipes and international reels to a highly appreciative audience, augmented by some of the crew of the sailing ship, who joined in lustily with the shanties! The Barokksolistene with their stunning individual virtuosity and flawless sense of ensemble, their versatility and their sheer personable enthusiasm have been the revelation of this year’s St Magnus International Festival for me.

This wonderful latterday concert flottant highlighted one of the issues which the Festival faces. While the attractive and small-scale venue afforded by the tall ship had sold out early, few of the other events I attended were filled to capacity, the result, I understand, of increased ticket prices – the reluctant response in turn to reduced funding. It seems to me an enormous shame if this distinctive Festival in its 41st year, problematically remote geographically but which makes superb use of its distinctive island environs, is to be starved of funding. This was a week buzzing with innovation, and I truly hope that the St Magnus International Festival will be allowed to remain the jewel that it is in the crown of Scotland’s Festival circuit.

Tags Baroque, Festival

Festival-conference

Ambronay Festival – 2017

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have probably rehearsed the pleasures of Ambronay sufficiently frequently in EMR to run the risk of repeating myself. So suffice it to say here that it remains the most enchanting and most welcoming of any early music festival venue known to me. To return to Ambronay and its abbey regularly feels tantamount to visiting family and friends. It is always something of a surprise to me that British early music enthusiasts largely have yet to discover the festival that takes place throughout weekends in September every year, given the international quality of the performers and its ease of access from Lyon (just over 50km) with its international airport.

This year’s festival bore the title ‘Vibrations : Souffle’, difficult to render in English since both words can have different meanings, but possibly something along the lines of ‘emotional breaths of wind’. Major events featured included a Monteverdi Orfeo conducted by Leonardo Garcia Alarcón; a recital by Philippe Jaroussky and Christina Pluhar’s L’Arpeggiata; an operatic recital by Karina Gauvin; Handel’s La resurrezione with Accademia Bizantina under their director Ottavio Dantone; a concert of spatial polyphony with the outstanding French ensemble Correspondances directed by Sébastien Daucé; and, for the third year running, a recital of Monteverdi madrigals with Les Arts Florissants and Paul Agnew. Additionally audiences could have found many smaller concerts, lectures and a lively and varied fringe that draws families and locals into the festival experience.

My choice this year fell on the second weekend, covering 21 to the 23 September. In recent years the festival has tended to spread its wings more, taking a number of events out of Ambronay into the surrounding area and this year our first concert (21 Sept) was held in the church of the famous medieval fortress village of Pérouges, some 20 kms away. It featured the ensemble Les Esprits Animaux (LEA), here joined by the cors de chasse of David Guerrier and Anne Boussard in a programme entitled ‘A la chasse’. In the event the hunting element was a relatively minor component of the programme, only one work, Telemann’s Overture in F, TWV 44:8 making specific reference to hunting calls and motifs. The hunting horn is of course a notorious beast to control and if some of the playing was somewhat wayward – especially in Vivaldi’s F major Concerto for 2 horns, RV538 – the players deserve plaudits for courage. In honesty, though, it has to be said that the most satisfying parts of the evening came from the pieces or movements in which the horns were not involved. I first heard LEA at Ambronay in 2011, when they were young artists in residence, at the time praising the ‘strong group personality’. Six years on the players have matured into a truly outstanding chamber ensemble that now plays with real finesse and finish without having lost any of the vitality and evident pleasure they derive from making music together. Among many memorable moments were a delicious, enchantingly elegant performance of Boismortier’s ‘Premier ballet de Village’ and a witty and – in the slow movement – exquisitely shaped performance of Vivaldi’s ‘Il Gardellino’ Flute Concerto, RV428, with LEA’s flautist Élodie Virot as soloist.

Les Esprits Animaux with David Guerrier & Anne Boussard, cors de chasse. © CCR Ambronay

The only concert the following day took place in Ambronay’s principal venue, the abbey church that lies at the heart of what is today the cultural centre complex. Comprising principally of a selection of operatic arias mostly featuring ladies in (often considerable) distress, it was given by Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin supported by Le Concert de la Loge under Julien Chauvin, who lead from first violin. The concert was of distinctly variable quality. Gauvin opened with two fierce, furious coloratura arias for the enraged Juno from Graupner’s Dido, Königin von Karthago (1707), in the event an unwise choice that might have been heard to better effect later in the programme when the voice had warmed up. As it was the lack of control, wayward intonation and excessive vibrato spoiled the undeniably dramatic impact of Gauvin’s powerful singing. She was much more effective in the succeeding pair of arias from Alessandro Scarlatti’s late masterpiece, Griselda (1721). Here Gauvin caught the pathetic nuances of ‘Finirà, Barbara sorte’ to touching effect, while finding the note of pride that is a part of the character of the sorely put-upon Griselda in ‘Figlio! Tiranno!’ Here as elsewhere ornamentation was sparse and there were no attempts at a trill in cadenzas. Best of all were a powerful, tragically dramatic account of Alcina’s ‘Ah! mio cor! and one of the encores, an account of ‘Will the sun forget to streak’ from Handel’s Solomon in which Gauvin seemed to find a poise not always evident elsewhere. On their own account Le Concert de la Loge contributed several orchestral extracts and accompanied Gauvin with an icy precision at the opposite polarity to the joyous playing of the previous evening.

Karina Gauvin with Le Concert de la Loge, director Julien Chauvin (violin). © CCR Ambronay

The final day of this year’s visit (23 September) provided two concerts, that in the late afternoon featuring the Consone Quartet, one of the young ensembles in the eeemerging competition at Ambronay in 2016. Then I thought their playing of Haydn’s profound late op 77/1 String Quartet showed considerable promise but would eventually benefit from the quartet’s own developing maturity. Now they opened with another rather earlier Haydn quartet, that in C, op 54/2. It was a good performance, with well-judged tempos and some expressive playing in the second part of the Adagio section of the final movement. But leader Agata Daraskaite did not always cope well with the high-lying violin part written for Johann Tost and the performance as a whole would have benefited from a more nuanced approach. It also really should not be necessary for players to re-tune between movements in a work of this length. The Consones seemed in some respects more at home with the romantic lyricism of Schubert’s well-known A-major Quartet, D 804 ‘Rosamunde’. The opening movement was laid out at a moderate tempo that allowed full reign to its inherent expressivity, while the famous ‘Rosamunde’ Andante was given a gracious flow that found room to incorporate a yearning wistfulness. There was an appealing swing to the Menuetto, while the final movement was given a strong rhythmic impetus that accentuated the German dance-like opening theme.

La resurrezione – l to r: Emőke Baráth (Angelo), Camille Poul (Maria Maddalena), Delphine Galou (Maria Cleofe), Ottavio Dantone (dir), Martin Vanberg (San Giovanni) and Lisandro Abadie (Lucifero). © CCR Ambronay

Two years ago Ottavio Dantone and his Accademia Bizantina gave a superb Handel Jephtha at the Beaune Festival, a performance that surprised me by displaying a depth and breadth that I’d not always previously associated with a conductor whose interpretations have at times seemed a touch brittle and or even eccentric. That he seems to have now grown beyond such things was triumphantly underlined by the evening’s performance devoted to an oratorio dating from the other end of Handel’s life, La resurrezione, premiered in Rome in 1708. The demands of the two works are of course totally different. While Jephtha is suffused with the radiant translucent wisdom of Handel’s last years, La resurrezione is the work of a fledgling genius transformed and inspired by his encounter with Italian culture. Dantone caught the spirit of Handel’s youthful exuberance to near-perfection, giving the remarkable accompagnati with which the work abounds full dramatic reign. In these and the arias, many of them demanding virtuoso singing, Dantone was supported by an outstanding solo team, among whom the Angel of the wonderful Hungarian soprano Emőke Baráth stamped her authority from the outset with a dazzling ‘Disserratevi’, every display of coloratura passage work articulated with gleaming accuracy. Lisandro Abadie’s Lucifer was projected with impressive strength and character, his bass having a sufficiently wide range to do justice to the sepulchral low notes incorporated in the role. Camille Poul, a replacement for the indisposed Hasnaa Bennani, sang an affecting Maddelena (Mary Magdalene), shaping her arias with real sensitivity, even if her lower register lacked strength, while the other Mary, Cleofe (Cleophas) was vividly communicated by the experienced alto Delphine Galou, whose attention to text, music and drama were throughout exemplary. Completing this exceptional line up, the San Giovanni (St John) of Martin Vanberg was notable above all for its refined musicality, the voice owning to a cultured liquid lyricism also capable of accurate passaggi. Add to these remarkable assets superbly alert and beautifully finished playing by Accademia Bizantina and this was a performance that confirmed Ottavio Dantone’s now established place as one of today’s leading Handel conductors.

Brian Robins

Tags Baroque

Festival-conference

D James Ross at the Edinburgh International Festival 2017

Post author By EMR2015
Post date September 6, 2017
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The Full Monteverdi and More

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he 450th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi’s birth has seen a blossoming in performances of his music, and the Edinburgh International Festival played its part by hosting a number of Monteverdi 450 events, clustered round a major presentation of his three surviving operas directed by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. The cycle, semi-staged in Edinburgh’s magnificent Usher Hall, opened with Orfeo, Monteverdi’s earliest surviving foray into the genre and one of the earliest of all full operas.

One of the chief advantages of this mode of presentation is that the full orchestra is onstage with the singers, allowing the subtleties and full-colour range of the various period instruments to permeate the texture. In the case of Orfeo, these include a full string section, a generous complement of cornetti and sackbuts, recorders, dulcian and a plethora of continuo instruments including Baroque guitars, chitarroni, harpsichords, organs, harp and viol. The full richness of Monteverdi’s carefully nuanced sound-world was allowed to develop before our eyes as well as our ears, while the instrumentalists were also able fully to interact with the singers.

The various soloists and chorus singers used the whole stage area including the organ loft at the back to dramatise the powerful story of the demi-god musician Orpheus and his doomed quest to retrieve his wife Euridice from Hades. The demanding part of Orfeo was taken by a silky-voiced Krystian Adam, whose beautifully expressive tenor voice, deft vocal ornamentation and convincing dramatic presence made him the perfect protagonist. His account of the famous show aria “Possente spirto”, a vehicle for the vocal virtuosity of the creator of the role, Francesco Rasi, was mesmerising. Also both vocally and dramatically impressive was Gianluca Buratto, whose characterisation of Caronte the boatman of the underworld was utterly convincing. The proceedings had opened with the fresh voice of Hana Blažiková in the role of Musica, who in addition to engaging the audience in the story accompanied herself at one point on the harp, an instrument which Orfeo surprisingly made no recourse to in spite of the references to a lyre in his recitatives. Ms Blažiková also proved a haunting Euridice, while the brief role of the Messaggera who imparts the tragic news of Euridice’s demise, was lent wonderful gravitas by the superb voice of Lucile Richardot, who would be an unforgettable Penelope the following night in Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria.

Impressive as all the guest soloists were, also dovetailing perfectly with the chorus when necessary, it was the ensemble singing and solo contributions of The Monteverdi Choir, which constituted the highlight for me of this remarkable performance. They are to my mind simply one of the finest vocal ensembles in the world, and showed their astonishing versatility by morphing into a dream opera chorus with pinpoint vocal precision and their customary gleaming tone. Under the inspired direction of Eliot Gardiner, one of the leading exponents of Monteverdi’s music, this minimalist performance on which he had collaborated with Elsa Rooke, Isabella Gardiner and Rick Fisher, had an iconically definitive quality.

It is a mark of the depth of talent in his vocal and instrumental forces that a quick reshuffle of personnel allowed Sir John to stage Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria the following evening. Hana Blažiková stepped easily into the virtuoso role of Minerva, raining blizzards of vocal ornaments, while Furia Zanasi, whose moving duet with Orfeo as Apollo the previous evening had been memorable, transferred capably to the title role of Ulisse. His wife Penelope, was as I mentioned, sung by Lucile Richardot, to me the vocal discovery of the project and whose wonderfully strong lower register lent her portrayal of the beleaguered queen an overwhelming pathos. Her clamouring suitors were splendidly characterised as were the various interfering gods and goddesses, while the previous night’s Orfeo, Krystian Adam, made for a lively and convincing Telemaco. It would also be unfair not to mention the individual tour de force by Robert Burt as the comically gormandising Iso. Again the minimalist staging proved ideal, while the idea of Penelope herself forming the shape of the bow which must be bent by the suitors and which is eventually mastered only by Ulysses, was nothing short of brilliant. Perhaps more obscure was the recorder player Rachel Becket abandoning her crotchets for crochet, spending her bars rest weaving and unweaving a woollen web, clearly an allusion to Penelope’s famous stratagem to stall the suitors. Perhaps not many audience members even noticed the recorder player’s industry, and most would have dismissed it as a rather cheeky distraction.

In our lives, only 24 hours had elapsed since Orfeo, but in Monteverdi’s life some thirty years had passed and he was now an old man. His orchestra had become much more of a conventional Baroque orchestra, and he was able to draw on a lifetime of compositional experience to animate the story of Ulysses’ return. This powerful masterpiece of his maturity includes some of his most impassioned writing, and the concluding duet between the eventually reconciled Ulysses and Penelope is both musically prescient and in this performance incomparably moving.

This veritable Monteverdi ‘Ring Cycle’ came to conclusion with the enigmatic L’Incoronazione di Poppea, an opera dating from the last year of the composer’s life. It is a work with a very modern feel to it – not one of the characters is likeable, evil triumphs over justice and ultimately we are asked to join in the celebrations for the coronation by a monstrous Roman emperor of his conniving mistress. I suspect the earliest Venetian audiences would have shared few of our qualms, and would probably easily have identified with the amoral universe presided over by a cynical pantheon of selfish and high-handed gods. In fact, this opera is thrillingly immediate in its amorality, and attention moves from the trivial complications of human relationships to the more sweeping themes of power and desire.

The only remotely sympathetic character, the philosopher Seneca, leant huge dignity and gravitas by Gianlucca Buratto (our Caronte in Orfeo) was disposed of before the mid-point of the opera, the chorus of his imploring friends providing one of the emotional high-points of the first part. The wronged Ottavia, was characterised strongly by Marianna Pizzolato, who cleverly showed the flaws as well as the virtues of Nero’s rejected first wife. Like Ottone, her one-time lover, and his new mistress Drusilla, she survives to be sent into exile. You will note that Monteverdi’s last opera prepares the way for myriad Baroque operas in which the plot complications verge on the impenetrable! As all the characters seem equally despicable, attention moves to the way they express themselves musically, and in this respect Carlo Vistoli’s Ottone, Anna Dennis’s Drusilla and Lucille Richardot’s hilarious nurse Arnalta, counterpointed by Michal Cierniawski’s cross-dressed Nutrice were all memorable.

In the two lead roles, Hana Blažiková, (previously our Musica and Euridice) was superb as the ambitious scheming Poppea, but the voice of the evening for me was the remarkable male soprano voice of Kangmin Justin Kim. Originally a castrato role, the part of Nerone is normally these days sung by a woman, but recent developments in the world of falsetto singing have brought a few male singers into the soprano tessitura. Mr Kim is one such, and the astonishing effect of his penetrating, perfectly pitched and impassioned voice, particular when duetting in the same range with Poppea and wreathed in the tones of cornetti was simply stunning. As with all of the principals, Kim threw himself into his role with enormous energy and commitment, and we were privileged to be given a genuine glimpse of the stellar popularity of the great Baroque virtuoso castrati.

L’Incoronazione may probably be deemed the least effective of the three surviving Monteverdi operas, slow to start and prolix in plot, but in this production with this remarkable cast and instrumental forces it rose to a breath-taking climax, which proved a fittingly magnificent climax to a glorious week of Monteverdi. Opera is of course just one facet of the multi-talented Monteverdi, and as part of the Queen’s Hall concert series of the EIF Robert Hollingworth’s early music ensemble I Fagiolini joined forces with the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble for a performance of the master’s Vespers music. The 1610 Vespers has become something of a cult classic – ironically since many musicologists would point out that it probably ought not even to be regarded as a unified performance piece – but imaginatively Hollingworth has compiled an ‘alternative’ Vespers drawn mainly from Monteverdi’s 1641 publication Selva Morale e spirituale. In a much tauter, more modern style than the 1610 music, these psalm settings showcase the virtuosity of solo and duetting voices against a backdrop of a pair of virtuoso violins, brass ensemble and continuo. The Monteverdi pieces are interspersed with music by his contemporaries Ludovico Grossi da Viadana, Frescobaldi, Ignazio Donati, and by masters of the previous generation Palestrina and Giovanni Gabrieli.

The charming Monteverdi settings, including the lovely Beatus vir, were beautifully performed, with subtle ornaments, heightened drama and exquisite focus and intonation. Particularly ear-catching were the group’s high tenors Hugo and Benedict Hymas, whose full-voiced accounts of alto lines were stunning. Hollingworth acknowledges his debt to the pioneering work of Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Consort, and this performance was fully the equal of Parrott’s groundbreaking 1980s recording of this material, but taking account of recent musicological developments. There is always a danger when you interleave the music of your chosen composer with the work of unfamiliar masters that it might outshine it, and this was certainly a possibility in the case of Donati’s ravishing setting of Dulcis amor Jesu, while for me the magnificence of Gabrieli’s 14-part Magnificat stole the show. Less effective was the account of Palestrina’s Ave verum corpus, with the top line in a highly ornamented version by Giovanni Bovicelli. This was played on a rather wheezy mute cornetto along with male voices, but as Bovicelli was a singer and presumably wrote his passagi as a vehicle for himself, it would have been lovely to have heard this sung. That a singer with the necessary skills was available was clearly demonstrated when tenor Matthew Long gave a barnstorming performance of Monteverdi’s Salve O Regina – cascades of vocal ornaments recalled the operatic fireworks we had enjoyed earlier in the week – bringing this hugely impressive concert to an unforgettable conclusion.

What does a reviewer, sated with a veritable banquet of Monteverdi, seek out to cleanse his musical palate? The Chiaroscuro Quartet seemed the ideal solution, and when their Queen’s Hall recital opened with wonderfully rarified accounts of three of the Contrapuncti from Bach’s Art of Fugue my Monteverdi detox was already underway. If ever the virtues of using period instruments were in doubt, the group’s account of Haydn’s sixth opus 76 quartet provided decisive evidence. The lightness of touch stemming from the use of gut strings and period bows, meant that most of the issues, which can bog down performances of this work, simply didn’t arise. The young musicians, already eminent soloists in their own right, simply flew through the piece in a perfectly poised flurry of brilliance. Their technical assurance allowed the audience to focus on Haydn’s compositional inventiveness and wit – at several points, titters actually rippled round the hall – and their entertaining reading elicited ecstatic applause.

We came back to a different world for the second half of the concert, which featured Schubert’s disturbing Death and the Maiden Quartet. This time the period instruments lent a raw power to Schubert’s explosive music, and – playing with an almost unbearable intensity – the four musicians brought out the full drama of this unsettling work. The brief passages in the major key seemed oddly and disturbingly shallow, while the darker episodes seemed all the darker for the shadowy ambience of the gut strings. At the end of this impressive performance, I was left considering the many ways in which period instrument and authentic vocal performances have not just consolidated the work of the 1980s and 90s but have brought the presentation of early music to new heights of excellence, and at the same time to a wider audience.

Festival-conference

“From Luther to Fasch – in four days flat”

Post author By EMR2015
Post date May 30, 2017
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The 14th International Fasch Festival in Zerbst/Anhalt, Germany, 20-23 April 2017

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith Lutherans around the world celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation in 2017, the International Fasch Festival organizers based in Zerbst/Anhalt had adopted “From Luther to Fasch” as their 2017 motto – and with good reason. In 1522 Martin Luther had preached in Zerbst, and in 1644 the principality of Anhalt-Zerbst was the only one in Anhalt to become exclusively Lutheran. In 1722 Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688–1758) was appointed Kapellmeister and put in charge of music at the Zerbst court. But he identified with another religious movement popular at the time, Lutheran Pietism, and, in 1726/27 had also spent several months composing vocal music for the Catholic court of Dresden. What impact, if any, did the confessional landscape of his day have on Fasch’s output and musical style?

It was up to the individual performers, ensembles, and conference participants to ponder that question. The opening concert on Thursday, 20 April, featured the fiery Main-Barockorchester Frankfurt, directed by Martin Jopp. They set the tone of the entire festival with a programme entitled “Luther, Fasch and Frau Musica”, as actor Raphael Kübler recited carefully selected texts about and by Martin Luther in between splendid instrumental music by Fasch (and one piece by Zelenka to cleanse the palate). My favourite was a newly edited orchestral suite in B-flat Major by Fasch. Thanks to the Central German Radio, MDR, listeners around the world could tune in to enjoy a live broadcast of the concert. Earlier that evening, the 2017 Fasch Prize was awarded to Prof. (em.) Manfred Fechner (Jena) for his 50-plus years of contributing to Fasch scholarship. One of the major driving forces of the Fasch Renaissance in the former German Democratic Republic, Fechner has also worked together closely with two other Fasch Prize recipients, Ludwig Güttler (1999) and Ludger Rémy (2015). Congratulations!

The two-day conference on “Fasch and the Confessional Landscape of his Day” began on 21 April in a new location, a lovely meeting room on the third floor of the local Sparkasse bank near the former court church, St. Bartholomäi. Members of the Main-Barockorchester Frankfurt opened with a trio sonata by Fasch to welcome scholars and visitors from Germany, Great Britain, and Canada. A surprisingly honest welcome speech by the Zerbst mayor, Andreas Dittmann, followed. This town’s ongoing commitment to the Festival since 1993 is both remarkable and admirable. Zerbst (population ca. 22,000) regularly and successfully competes with other Baroque music festivals such as Handel in Halle, Telemann in Magdeburg, and Bach in Köthen.

The keynote address in 2017 was presented by Michael Maul (Bach-Archiv Leipzig). He examined the various Lutheran educational institutions that had shaped Fasch’s career path, especially prior to his arrival in Zerbst in 1722. By way of a humorous soccer analogy, Maul argued convincingly that Fasch and many of his peers were products of the splendid educational institutions that Luther had spearheaded in the 16th century, in particular the top-notch Kantoreien (church choirs) and, of course, the Thomasschule in Leipzig from which Fasch graduated in 1708.

Historian Jan Brademann (Evangelische Landeskirche Anhalt, Dessau) then emphasized that while Anhalt-Zerbst’s multi-confessional landscape may have brought with it certain problems, they would not necessarily have affected Fasch’s creative output as a composer. A new primary source related to Johann Baptist Kuch, Fasch’s predecessor as Kapellmeister, was introduced by Rashid-S. Pegah (Berlin). Kuch had left Zerbst in spring 1722, after been ordered to pay a large amount of money to the mother of his child, the feisty Maria Agnes Amelang. She had successfully lodged a complaint against him with the local (Lutheran Orthodox) church court, the Zerbst Consistory. J. F. Fasch’s “Catholic” music was at the core of an investigation carried out by Gerhard Poppe (Koblenz/Dresden). He focused on settings of the Ordinarium Missae that Fasch had composed for the Dresden court, adding a nostalgic touch when he used an actual record player for his musical examples.

Chorales featured prominently in presentations given on Friday afternoon by Gottfried Gille (Bad Langensalza) and Brian Clark (Arbroath, GB), Fasch Prize recipients in 2015 and 1997, respectively. Using a bi-confessional lens because Reformed Lutherans were allowed to worship alongside Orthodox Lutherans in Zerbst, Gille had painstakingly examined multiple extant 17th- and 18th-century Zerbst hymnals. He stressed the presence of chorales whose texts had been written by poets with an Anhalt-Zerbst connection. Clark introduced two such individuals – Prince Johann Adolph von Anhalt-Zerbst and Johann Betichius – in his paper. Clark also clarified that a set of autograph parts by Fasch from the Musikstube Zerbst in Dessau (Z 100, A33), previously assumed to be related to the 1738 Zerbster Cantional, belongs, in fact, to Fasch’s 1730/31 cantata cycle. Nigel Springthorpe (London, GB) then reassessed the cantata repertoire that was performed at the Zerbst court chapel between 1749 and 1765. He argued in favour of Johann Georg Roellig (1710–1790), Fasch’s successor, having taken over that responsibility from Fasch around 1755.

A late afternoon concert followed, with conference participants and Festival visitors alike being enthralled by the Italian ensemble Zefiro. The five performers brought the house down or, more precisely, the sold-out Fasch Saal located on the second floor of the Zerbst Stadthalle, the historic former riding hall of the princely family of Anhalt-Zerbst. Their expertly executed programme consisted of delightful chamber music by Fasch, Telemann, Stölzel, and Zelenka, selected from the famous 1743 Zerbst “Concert-Stube” court music inventory. But it was Lotti’s “Echo in F major” that put a smile on everyone’s face, courtesy of oboist and ensemble director Alfredo Bernadini. He pretended to have forgotten his music, only to leave the room and play it backstage, as per the title of the piece.

Niniwe vocal art, an all-female German ensemble based in Leipzig, fired up the audience inside the chilly Zerbst palace during the traditional “Fasch Midnight” crossover concert (actual starting time: 9 pm). The turnout was disappointingly small, especially compared to the afternoon, when about 150 people toured the palace to view the impressive, ongoing renovations and improvements carried out by the local Zerbst palace society. My favourite? The fantastic observation platform on the roof top.

The second, shorter conference day began with a paper by Marc-Roderich Pfau (Berlin). He identified a new cantata cycle by Christoph Förster (1693–1745). His Evangelische Seelen-Ermunterung (composed between ca. 1738 and 1745) was performed at the Zerbst court chapel during Fasch’s tenure as Kapellmeister, specifically on Sunday afternoons in 1749/50. Next, Beate Sorg (Darmstadt) investigated the so-called “Dresden” cantata cycle; it had been premiered at the Zerbst court chapel in 1726/27. She suggested that Fasch had not only copied cantatas by Christoph Graupner (1683–1760), his former composition teacher, to include them in the “Dresden cycle”, but also put the latter together himself. Evan Cortens (Calgary, Canada) examined Graupner’s background and musical training as a composer of opera. They made him the perfect choice as Kapellmeister for Ernst Ludwig, Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt, who was keen on having church cantatas take the place of opera as the principal musical event at his court.

The final conference session dealt with princely funeral music. Drawing from a multitude of extant primary sources, Barbara M. Reul (Regina, Canada) identified a new “Fasch-Spielstätte”, i.e. a local venue where works by Fasch were performed. In addition to performing two cantatas required for memorial services at the court chapel, the court Kapelle premiered two more sacred works during special memorial events held at the local university, the Gymnasium Illustre (aka “Francisceum”). Reul also introduced a hitherto unknown autograph letter by Fasch from 1737 that reflects his noble employer’s generous financial nature. Irmgard Scheitler (Würzburg), an expert in German literature, then zoomed in on Fasch‘s 1747 funeral cantata for Prince Christian August, Catherine the Great’s father, a comparatively new genre at the time. She emphasized the high quality of the text, courtesy of the resident Zerbst court poet J. G. Jacobi, with its surprisingly affective and intense lyrics and eloquent imagery. Finally, Maik Richter (Halle/Saale) contextualized his sensational discovery in summer 2016. Eleven previously unknown letters written by Johann Friedrich Fasch and Anhalt-Köthen court officials from 1755 relate to three funeral cantatas for Prince August Ludwig, texts of which Richter recently located as well. Had Fasch taken on the role of Oberhofkapellmeister of the entire Anhalt region? This would certainly explain why the court of Anhalt-Köthen failed to appoint a successor for J. S. Bach during Fasch’s tenure in Zerbst, argued Richter.

The Ratssaal, a performing venue inside Zerbst’s historic town hall, a former Kavaliershaus, was a fitting backdrop for an afternoon concert with Dorothee Oberlinger. The well-known German recorder player had brought along four special “friends”, among them Zefiro’s Alfredo Bernardini and his violin-playing daughter. They performed virtuosic quadro sonatas, i.e. music that features three to four independent melodic lines scored for a variety of instruments, including strings, woodwinds and Basso continuo. By hearing Fasch alongside Vivaldi, Telemann, and (the younger) J. J. Janitsch, the audience could appreciate how the Zerbst Kapellmeister’s compositions fared in the musical “style universe” of the late Baroque.

On Saturday evening, the Rheinische Kantorei and Das Kleine Konzert, directed by Hermann Max, presented a splendid concert at the Trinitatiskirche, yet another venue where music by Fasch had been performed during his tenure in Zerbst. Recorded by Deutschlandfunk for broadcast on 7 May 2017, the concert programme captured the “confessional landscape” lens of the conference best, particularly Fasch’s Missa in G Major (Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo only). This gorgeous work, edited by Brian Clark specifically for the 2017 Fasch Festival, as well as two psalm settings in Latin by Fasch, truly exemplified his ability to make “Catholic” texts come alive in an Orthodox Lutheran performing environment. A CD based on this concert is in the making; it will hopefully include the newly-edited overture suite in seven movements by Fasch which opened the evening – and perhaps also the entire overture suite by G. P. Telemann that was advertised in the programme booklet. The Zerbst audience only got to hear the first movement, followed by the conductor’s apologies for overestimating the concert’s total length.

On Sunday morning, 23 April, about 20 people braved the cold and gathered at the Fasch Memorial Stone on the “Neue Brücke” street, where Fasch had rented a place in the 1740s. The festive worship service at the St. Bartholomäi Church up the street that morning was broadcast live by the Central German Radio as well. At its heart was the modern-day premiere of a cantata by Fasch from 1731 by the Zerbst Kantorei, once again edited by Brian Clark. “It is always very special to perform Fasch’s music in Zerbst”, one of the choir members told me afterwards. This sentiment was echoed by bassoonist Peter Whelan from Ireland, who – “finally!”, he said – got to play instrumental music by Fasch during the closing concert in the Aula of the Zerbst Francisceum (formerly the Gymnasium Illustre ). Whelan is a member of the Barocksolisten München ensemble who presented a musical “Grand Tour” on which many a young noble embarked to increase his knowledge of art and culture in Western Europe. The most popular place was Italy which Fasch, to his great disappointment, never managed to visit in person. But he “spoke” perfect Italian in his chamber music, which the ensemble translated perfectly for modern ears, having paired it with Fasch’s “idols” Vivaldi and Telemann.

Overall, the 2017 Fasch Festival offered truly superb performances with highly attractive concerts programmes more or less focused on the overall “Luther to Fasch” motto. The efforts of the Fasch Society on the day prior to the official opening also deserve an honorable mention. Like in past festival years, a multitude of Zerbst primary and secondary school students met at the largest performance venue in town and learned about Fasch’s life and works via a short, humorous play (apparently, he was constantly interrupted when trying to compose music!), live music by youths studying at the local Zerbst music school, and a children’s dance group dressed up in Baroque costumes. As far as the conference papers are concerned, they will be published with Ortus as vol. 15 of the Fasch-Studien (with abstracts in German and English) at the end of 2017/in early 2018.

The next Fasch Festival will highlight music and musicians connected to Anhalt-Zerbst. Ensembles interested in performing in Zerbst/Anhalt at the end of April 2019 are kindly requested to send an e-mail with programming suggestions and a preliminary budget to IFaschG@t-online.de, attention: Bert Siegmund, president.

Barbara M. Reul

Tags Baroque

Festival-conference

Eeemerging at the 2016 Ambronay Festival

Post author By EMR2015
Post date October 13, 2016
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The Consone String Quartet in performance — The Consone String Quartet, Photograph: © Bertrand Pichène

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s noted in my report of the 2015 Ambronay Festival, an excellent reason for going to the last weekend of the festival in early October is its incorporation of a ‘festival within a festival’, the competition for young early music ensembles held under the auspices of eeemerging, an EU initiative (and, no, I’m not going there). Each concert of some 45 minutes length takes place before a team of judges from Ambronay’s festival partners and an enthusiastic audience, which is also encouraged to participate by selecting its own winner. Once again six ensembles were chosen, this year from 47 applications (down on last year). Once again the first, perhaps most important, thing to say is that it is immensely uplifting to see so many exceptionally gifted young musicians involved in this kind of exercise.

That said these gifts do not always take right the direction, as the opening concert on the morning of 8 October demonstrated. This was given by Nexus, an ensemble consisting of two recorders, cello and keyboard playing 17th-century Italian works by Legrenzi, Castello, Marini, in addition to featuring vocal items by Merula, Barbara Strozzi and Monteverdi sung by mezzo Marielou Jacquard. Sadly, as with one of the ensembles last year, Nexus showed scant evidence of having paid attention to 17th-century style, their performances showing little sign of nuance, colour or the bizzarie (imagination) so essential if this music is truly to come to life. I find it odd and not a little depressing that talented young musicians such as these are not getting (or seeking?) more guidance on matters of musicology and style. The succeeding program by I Discordanti, a vocal quartet with continuo support of gamba, theorbo and harpsichord featured repertoire from much the same period. They perhaps concentrated a little too heavily on chromaticism (it really is time Luigi Rossi’s ubiquitous ‘Toccata settima’ was given a rest), but brought a welcome sense of the stylistic needs of the music. This was particularly true of two extended cantatas by Rossi, which were well projected. I Discordanti are not yet the finished article, but they deserve every encouragement.

The opening concert of the afternoon session introduced Prisma, yet another ensemble that specialises in early 17th-century instrumental music (Cima, Bertali, Salomone Rossi etc.), its membership being violin, recorder, gamba and archlute. Their approach was a striking advance on that of Nexus. Violinist Franciska Hajdu not only possesses an excellent technique but has also taken the trouble to employ a 17th-century ‘Biber’ bow (though not yet to have her violin set up with low tension strings) and throughout played with a real sense of style well matched by her partner, recorder player Elisabeth Champollion. The continuo playing was equally of a high standard and I would not quarrel with voting that saw Prisma end up with the audience prize. For me their main competitors were the succeeding Goldfinch Ensemble, an ensemble of former students of The Hague Royal Conservatoire comprising of violin, flute, gamba and harpsichord. They were particularly impressive in technically accomplished and expressively musical performances of two fine trio sonatas by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. This is another group that is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

On the following morning two remaining ensembles presented programmes, the first of which was mainly devoted to Haydn’s wonderful late String Quartet, op 77/1 in G. The performers were the very young-looking Consone Quartet, who had a very good shot at a work they will play better when their own maturity comes closer to matching that of the music. This was particularly true of the Adagio, one of Haydn’s most deeply profound quartet movements. Finally The Curious Bards, an ensemble based in nearby Lyon that specialises in the research and performance of traditional Irish and Scottish airs and dances. Their programme of 18th-century arrangements was put across with great accomplishment and verve, but I would question the validity of its inclusion in this context. And isn’t there something rather ridiculous about an audience sitting in serried rows in a 21st-century concert hall listening to music that was never intended for such a purpose? Still, to avoid ending what was overall another joyous experience on a sour note, it must be confessed that said audience loved The Curious Bards.

Brian Robins

Tags Baroque, Classical

Festival-conference

JACOB 3.0

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Sunday 4th September I attended the world premiere of a new collaborative venture to promote the life and music of Jakob van Eyck. Known to millions of recorder players around the world due to the many sets of variations he wrote for the instrument based on popular tunes of his day, he is less familiar to the citizens of Utrecht (where he worked for most of his adult life) and of the Netherlands in general. This project, which also opened the 2016 season of Cultural Sundays (Culturele Zondagen), aimed to correct that wrong by making van Eyck’s music relevant in the 21st century, and to give music history a new “local hero”.

The Grote Zaal in the Vredenburg had been transformed into something resembling a jazz club by purple lighting and synthetic smoke. On the central stage there was a large DJ’s mixing table with a variety of turntables and other devices, and a second table with an Apple device. These were the domains of Arjen de Vreede (DJ DNA) and Jorrit Tamminga respectively. I learned that recorder sound samples had been cut onto vinyl discs to allow the background use of chords. Another machine, which had been acquired at great expense from Kraftwerk in the 1990s, transformed sounds into growls. While the DJ accompanied using a variety of techniques, Tamminga sampled and mixed and looped the live performance of star recorder player, Erik Bosgraaf. In a dramatic white suit, he made his entry playing one of the later variations of a van Eyck piece, and worked backward until he ended up at the relatively long notes of the original tune. He then progressed up some stairs and transferred to a metallic instrument upon which he produced flashes of white noises. Up another flight of stairs saw him encounter and play what he later called his great bass ikea flute (similar to those shown below). From here he descended once again to the stage, played some more van Eyck on a different, higher pitched recorder and then walked off, leaving DNA and Tamminga to wind down the accompanying sounds and the impressive light show to a subdued ending.

I must be honest and say that I found the concert a challenge. I understand that van Eyck and his music deserve to be more widely known. I also appreciate that new approaches have to be taken to give it modern currency. The concert hall was packed and the audience highly appreciative of the performance. I found it a powerfully thought-provoking experience – if slightly shocking in the context of the early music which filled the rest of my time in Utrecht – but having one’s preconceptions challenged and boundaries pushed is never a bad thing. Samples from the show are available HERE, so you can listen for yourselves.

Brian Clark

My thanks to:

Residenties in Utrecht
Festival Oude Muziek
Gaudeamus Muziekweek
Culturele Zondagen

Festival-conference

A wonderful weekend in Utrecht

Post author By EMR2015
Post date September 7, 2016
No Comments on A wonderful weekend in Utrecht

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Utrecht skyline may have changed dramatically since I last attended the early music festival, but some things remain reassuringly familiar – the friendliness and helpfulness of the Dutch, the wonderful array of foreign cuisine available to visitors, the quaint old buildings in the middle of the Netherlands’ fourth largest city and – most important of all – the fantastic quality of the concerts!

I was fortunate enough to enjoy several events on the last weekend of the festival which this year was devoted primarily to Venice. An hour or so after being guided to my extremely comfortable hotel (a stone’s throw from the main railway station and a brief walk from the main focus of the festival, the city’s amazing multi-space music venue, the Vredenburg), I attended one of the Eventalks, a series of diverse seminar-like lectures covering a broad spectrum of topics related to the theme of the festival and framed by music. Sandra Ponzanesi‘s “Postcolonial Italy: Quo vadis?” sought the roots of at least some of the current migrant crisis in Italy’s rather tardy forays into the European land grab in Africa; the suppression of native cultures and denial of education (typical of all colonial powers) and later generations’ acceptance of responsibility for such actions adds another level of meaning to how the death toll amongst aspiring migrants risking the crossing to an Italian island (the closest outreach of Europe to the Libyan coast) is perceived not only in Italy but elsewhere in the world. Olga Pashchenko introduced and followed the talk with a nicely contrasted selection of harpsichord music by Bernardo Storace.

Later even that planned, my second musical event of the evening was a concert of Monteverdi by Cantar lontano, directed by Marco Mencoboni. As an earlier concert had overrun, we were obliged to wait for a while before we started, but the organisers very kindly laid on liquid refreshments – though it seemed a great idea at the time, as the minutes ticked by and the red wine kicked in, the likelihood of falling asleep became a very real one… Finally we started a little over half an hour late; however, barely had the first segment ended than another large crowd joined the audience, so the first piece was reprised to welcome them! This was followed by the Lamento dells ninfa, one of the composer’s (rightly!) most popular pieces. If the singing was dramatic, there was something of Monteverdi’s own instruction missing – while the three men’s voices are to keep time with the descending continuo bass, the soprano (who here had the most glorious voice!) is instructed to sing rather more freely, as if agitated by the letter she is supposedly reading. Similarly in Il combattimento that followed, Tancredi and Clorinda (the protagonists of the work) were placed on opposite sides of the stage, facing outwards and rarely interacted with one another; the narrator, on the other hand, wandered around the stage – at times looking rather manic, if I’m honest – but giving the most passionate delivery of the wonderfully expressive text I have ever heard; indeed, although my lady friends had a particular interest in one of the lutenists, for me Luca Dordolo as Il testo was the star of this show. Another highlight was the virtuoso wide-ranging voice of the bass, and the pointed dissonant chords in Hor ch’el ciel.

On Saturday morning, I joined a guided tour of the Dom tower where the town carillonneur, Malgosia Fiebig, gave an amazing recital including three of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Climbing more than 100m above the city was a thrill in itself, with the history of the building explained along the way. Then, after she played another concerto by Il prete rosso, she explained how, as well as the automated quarter hourly tones, the instrument can, and is, regularly used for recitals. The physicality of playing the carillon has to be seen to be believed, and yet she was able to coax different dynamic levels from what seemed an uncompromising instrument – it was very impressive!

One of my Utrecht hosts then took me and a colleague on a boat trip around the Utrecht canals with Wineke van Muiswinkel, one of the organisers of JACOB 3.0 (about which more HERE), which was a nice way to find out more about the city’s rich history. More of the afternoon was spent on touristy activities (including a trip to the charming Spelklok Museum – its motto “the most cheerful museum in the Netherlands” says it all!) and then I took in the various stalls at the early music trade exhibition in the Vredenburg. Mostly these consisted of instrument makers, but there were a couple of publishers, some music/book shops, and one promoting Alexander Technique.

The main event in the evening was Ensemble Correspondances, directed by Sébastien Daucé, exploring Charpentier’s time in Italy and its possible influence on his own music. This required a very large ensemble, since the main work in the second half was his mass for four choirs, which were assembled in four corners of the centrally placed main stage. They had ended the first half with other four-choir music but two of the choirs had been elevated to opposite galleries for this which gave an entirely different aspect to the music due to dynamic variation between the groups. Other music included a psalm setting for solo bass with violins, a motet for two sopranos with cornetti, and – for me the pinnacle of many high points – a portion of Legrenzi’s sequence for the dead which, as I have commented before, in at least one movement sounds more French than Charpentier’s himself; perhaps that is why it drew these performers’ attention? While I shared my friends’ overall delight with a fabulous concert, I had reservations about the orchestration of such music (not only doing so at all, but the actual choice and numbers of instruments, and – for example – the allocation of cornetti to double soprano lines of the two “less important” choirs), and I found the constant relocating of players and singers around the space distracting (especially for an encore).

The first half of Sunday was devoted to Jacob van Eyck. Well known by recorder players in the UK (where his increasingly virtuosic variations on popular tunes of his day often feature on exam syllabi) but unfamiliar apparently to the majority of Utrechters (as well as entertaining the population in a local park with his playing, he was among the city’s first carillonneurs!), van Eyck has largely been put on the map by Dr Thiemo Wind. He led a guided tour of the principle locations associated with the composer, explaining the history of the city as he went and offering contemporary images of the city that van Eyck never saw – he was blind! A rather special moment was Wind’s rendition of a set of variations on “What shall we do in the evening?” in the beautiful cloisters of the Domkerk.

A couple of hours later van Eyck’s music provided the inspiration for a new project, JACOB 3.0 – check out my review HERE.

The afternoon concert that I opted to go to was given by Cappella Romana, directed by Alexander Lingas, in the Willibrordkerk. The programme featured sacred music for the imperial Russian chapel by composers during the reign of Catherine the Great. Two not especially well-known Italians, Baldassare Galuppi and Giuseppe Sarti, were interspersed with pieces by Berezovsky and Bortnyansky and other slightly later Russian composers. The music was only occasionally formulaic in the sense that there were verses and responses – sometimes, rather oddly for unaccustomed ears, simultaneously. Otherwise, these were fine motets, beautifully sung by twelve voices, with solos all taken by members of the choir. If there was something that I missed it was the dark vowels typical of that part of the world, and the lack of any excursions off the bottom of the bass clef which are so typical of later orthodox music. And while it was technically impressive that the huge conference booklet reproduced the Old Church Slavonic texts in their beautiful script, perhaps a transliteration might have been a more useful addition to the Dutch translation.

After yet another delicious curry from NAMASKAR (a fantastic Indian place directly opposite the music venue!) I went to my second Eventalk, this time a very brief discussion of two early republics – the Venetian and the Dutch. James Kennedy touched on aspects of both that modern republics might like once again to consider adopting; honesty (the concept of which, he told us, was a renaissance extension of the notion of honour which came about through the development of international trade), compassion for the poorest in society (for both the Venetians and the early Dutch this was considered an obligation) and a sense of communal agreement in the political sphere – decisions should be made by discussion and compromise for the greater good of society at large, rather than a few vested interests. As usual, the talk was framed by keyboard music, once again nicely played (on organ and harpsichord) by Olga Pashchenko.

Then it was time for the very last concert of the season. Festival director Xavier Vandamme gave a very brief introduction, confirming that the 2016 was the most successful Festival oude muziek in recent years, with ticket sales up over the past seven years by an incredible 80%!

There is a tradition of saving the best till last and in Le concert spiritual and the consummate showman Hervė Niquet, Utrecht certainly did that. Vivaldi with only women’s voices was the theme; not a new idea, of course, but there were slight differences in approach here. Not only were the tenor and bass parts transposed up an octave, but the solos were all sung chorally (so even those who sang tenor in the chorus also sang the solo soprano parts, etc.). The concert was exhilarating – tempi were brisk, the singing was fabulous, the instrumental playing was incisive and Niquet took every opportunity to play with the audience – which they lapped up and afforded him (of course) a standing ovation. Yet, from a musicological point of view, or even a HIP perspective, there were deficiencies, too – where were the wind instruments? (That said, I doubt if a baroque trumpeter could have played the final movement at such a speed!) If all the voices sing the solos, why don’t all the cellos play the continuo part? Why did one from each orchestra play some? Why were there even two orchestras, when only one work required that layout? One might argue that none of that matters, but if the programme notes ask “Does this mean we more closely approach Vivaldi’s intentions?”, such aspects of performance practice must be brought into question.

But let’s not end on a negative note! These were two and a half days of fairly hectic activity – though the festival and its fringe events offered many, many more! – giving a taste of music and life in Venice and its influence in musical history from Willaert (one of the feature composers, though I did not manage to hear any, alas…) to Catherine the Great’s Russia. Terrifically well-attended concerts, with deeply appreciative audiences and an army of ever-smiling, always helpful festival staff – Utrecht, thank you; it was an absolute pleasure!

Brian Clark

Thanks to the following for arranging my visit:

Residenties in Utrecht
Festival Oude Muziek
Gaudeamus Muziekweek
Culturele Zondagen
Centre for the Humanities
Tourisme Utrecht

And on a personal note, I’d especially like to thank Marthe van der Hilst, Lidy Ettema and Juliëtte Dufornee for making my stay such fun!

Tags Baroque, Classical

Festival-conference

Sex and Alienation in Edinburgh

Post author By EMR2015
Post date September 7, 2016
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he musical partnership of Mark Padmore and Kristian Bezuidenhout is one which through a series of definitive Lieder recordings and concert tours has become synonymous with excellence. Thus it was that I approached their Queen’s Hall recital at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival with sky-high expectations.

The programme featured some of my favourite songs, Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and Schubert’s Schwanengesang, as well as some less familiar Beethoven songs. These opened the recital, establishing Padmore’s gloriously intense lyrical tone and Bezuidenhout’s delicate and authoritative touch upon the fortepiano, a copy by Rodney Regier (revised by Beunk and Wennink) of an instrument of 1824 by the Viennese maker Conrad Graf. Padmore’s perfect control of his head register led to some sublime moments in Beethoven’s Abendlied, and prepared us for a beautifully poised account of An die ferne Geliebte which exploited fully the contrasts between the work’s dynamic passages and its more contemplative episodes.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Schubert’s Schwanengesang, less the valedictory song cycle that the title promises than a posthumous marketing opportunity for the publisher Hasslinger, who on the composer’s death simply lumped together all the remaining Schubert songs he had on his books. This rather unpromising context doesn’t prevent Schwanengesang from gripping, moving and charming the listener by turns, but the challenge for great performers is to mould the music into some sort of unified cycle. Rather than being apologetic about the contrast between the texts by the great Heine and the less-than-great Rellstab, the performers simply gave each their due respect, performing each for what they are.

Where the Beethoven had been lyrically engaging, the duo’s account of Schwanengesang took us into a whole new realm of expression. We were reminded that this was music written in a city where barely a century later high society would be queuing up at the door of Sigmund Freud, and Padmore and Bezuidenhout took us on a dark exploration of the desperation, alienation and mania that lurks just under the surface of many of Schubert’s settings of Heine. The percussive potential of the fortepiano and Padmore’s rich palette of vocal tones combined to produce almost overwhelming tension. We almost needed the sunny world of the Rellstab settings as an antidote. In response to thunderous applause from a discerning Queen’s Hall audience, the pair brought this powerful recital to an enigmatic conclusion with a mesmerising account of Beethoven’s Resignation, a song setting a text by Friedrich von Haugwitz in which the poet reluctantly accepts his lot in life – almost the finale to Schwanengesang that Schubert was unable to write.

My second visit to the 2016 EIF saw me at the opera for a performance of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte. All very conventional you may think, but not so. This was a production of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Korea National Opera and EIF featuring the Cape Town Opera Chorus, The Freiburger Barockorchester and a stellar line-up of soloists directed by Jérémie Rohrer. Da Ponte’s dark comedy of manners is transported to pre-war Abyssinia under Italian occupation, a point established from the start by a parched north-African set and an opening anti-Mussolini satirical song played on a gramophone.

So not Mozart as we know it. But to deal with the positive aspects first this beautifully nuanced performance was archetypal Mozart in almost every respect. Sandrine Piau’s coquettish Despina and Rod Gilfry’s raddled Don Alfonso were perfect foils for one another, while the dashing young lovers Joel Prieto and Nathuel di Piero and their ‘intendeds’ Lenneke Ruiten and Kate Lindsey were technically and musically superb. In the pit the authentic sounds of the Freiburger Barockorchester lent true authority to the overall sound and the evening was an unalloyed musical delight.

BUT – and it is no mean but – the production was problematic. In advance of the run we had all been sent a letter warning us about its explicit sexual nature, and indeed it seemed as if quite a number of the potential audience members voted with their feet, opting for a refund. My objections, however, stemmed not from prudery but from the fact that the transfer of context simply didn’t work. The casual racial and sexual abuse of the local Africans was disturbing, and the heroes’ transformation into black soldiers was startling, but ultimately this attempt to add morally unsettling depths to da Ponte’s rather trivial story foundered on the fact that this is very much a light if cynical comedy. The necessary slapstick moments hopelessly defused any sexual tension, and some of the more graphic onstage displays were simply embarrassing – no sex please, we’re British!

As one audience member put it succinctly to me, ‘If you are aspiring to Mozart’s sound-world in the pit and musically onstage, why not go the whole hog and present the whole opera as he conceived it?’ Why not indeed. It was not quite a production to listen to with closed eyes, as the set and direction were both visually pleasing, but the chief delights were in the sounds of the period instruments expertly played, Rohrer’s crisp direction and the lovely supple voices of the young cast.

D James Ross

Tags Lieder, Opera

Festival-conference

Itinéraire Baroque Festival

Post author By EMR2015
Post date August 11, 2016
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Dordogne, France – 28-31 July 2016

Actor and musicians — Comedian Lorenzo Bassotto, soprano Elena Bertuzzi and Accademia Strumentale Italiana

Picture a landscape of rolling hills, fields of sunflowers and maize. Intersperse with deeply shaded woodland, sleepy small towns and villages in which the most notable feature is almost inevitably a 12th or 13th century Romanesque church and you have the Périgord Vert, a largely unspoilt area situated in the north of the Dordogne region of France. It sounds an unlikely venue for a festival of Baroque music inspired by one of the great names in early music. Yet in 2016 Itinéraire Baroque reached its 15th edition, still enjoying the benign leadership of its co-founders Ton Koopman and festival director Robert Nicolas-Huet, the festival owing its genesis to the Dutch musician’s ownership of a house in the area.

Itinéraire Baroque may occupy a short space of time, but over four days it packs in a large amount of music. This year it was possible to attend no fewer than eleven events – I missed the final concert – covering a spectrum stretching chronologically from Josquin des Prez to Haydn’s late ‘Nelson’ Mass, stylistically from simple Dutch Calvinist contrafactas of Dowland songs to the splendour of Mozart’s ‘Coronation’ Mass.

Harpist in a French church — Harpist Emma Huijsser at the church of Bourg des Maisons

At the heart of Itinéraire Baroque is the day that not only gives the festival its name, but also adds an innovative dimension. Each year the Saturday (in this case 30 July) is devoted to a magical musical tour that focuses on short concerts given in five of the historic churches of the region, buildings that in some cases otherwise rarely see the light of day. This year’s audience met early at the church St Cybard at Cercles, a mostly 14th century building, now beautifully restored and of somewhat grandiose pretensions for a community of some 200 souls. There we were regaled with a short Bach organ recital by Koopman (including a lovely performance of the Pastorale, BWV 590; so appropriate to these surroundings) before being split into five groups, each to follow a different itinéraire to the venues, where a short concert is preceded by an introduction to the architecture and history of the building. Of the churches this year that at our first stop, the tiny but beautifully proportioned 12th century St Saturnin at Coutures, turned out to be a perfect gem. It was host to a largely satisfying concert, too, a recital of a group of charming Kraus songs and Haydn’s cantata Arianna a Naxos by the Swedish mezzo Anna Zander and fortepianist Mayumi Kamata, whose strongly characterized performance of the Haydn was marred only by the sluggish tempos at which both arias were taken. We found awaiting us for the second concert an almost equally appealing church in the shape of that at Bourg des Maisons, where a recital of arrangements of lute music on Baroque harp was given by the accomplished young Dutch player Emma Huijsser, standing in for the indisposed Hana Blažíková. The church is especially notable for a ravishing and only recently revealed set of frescos, the earliest of which date from the 12th century, while Huijsser impressed particularly in a highly musical and finely articulated performance of Bach’s Lute Suite in D minor, BWV995. Following a generous break for lunch (well, we are in France, after all!), the next venue on the itinerary was the only non-ecclesiastical one. The lawns of the 15th century Château de Beauregard played host to a recital by Camerata Trajectina, one of Holland’s long-established early music ensembles. I fear a good lunch, the hot afternoon and routine performances conspired to make a programme entitled ‘Dowland in Holland’ less than enticing. For the following concert it was back to church, in this case the rather austere looking St Martin at Cherval, where the La Cetra Barockconsort played a potpourri from Die Zauberflöte arranged in 1793 for flute and string trio by one Franz Heinrich Ehrenfried. Initially the skill with which he coped with the contrapuntal complexities of the Overture intrigued, but interest later lapsed and I fell to musing on the incongruity of a 21st century audience sitting solemnly in a church listening to an arrangement designed to fulfil no more profound a function than provide social entertainment. The final course of this richly diversified 6-course musical feast necessitated only a short hop to St Martial Viveyrol, where the Dordogne-based Le Vertigo gave a pleasant if unremarkable concert based on French music (and Purcell) that might have been heard at the court of Charles II. Unsurprisingly soprano Caroline Dangin-Bardot sounded more comfortable in French repertoire by Michel Lambert (the lovely air ‘Vos mépris), Sébastien Camus and Charpentier than in Purcell’s ‘The Plaint’ and ‘Fairest Isle’.

The festival had opened two days before with a Bach programme given by Koopman and his Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. The venue was the church of St Martin in Champagne, a building that has its roots in the Romanesque period, as evidenced by the magnificently decorated multi-arched doorway, but that was much rebuilt and enlarged in the 16th century. Sadly, it turned out to have treacherous acoustics and although I tried three different places it proved impossible to hear sufficiently clearly to come to definitive conclusions about the performances. This applied especially to the singing of soprano Yetzabel Arias Fernandez, replacing Hana Blažíková, whose full-blooded approach to Jauchzet Gott, BWV51 and the Wedding Cantata, BWV202 seemed only to exacerbate the inherent problems created by the building, the voice spreading alarmingly in its upper range. Elsewhere Koopman’s long-established and exceptional empathy with Bach’s music could be intermittently appreciated in vital performances of the Orchestral Suite no.1 and the magnificent Sinfonia from the cantata Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats, BWV42, but the poor acoustic made this overall a disappointing concert.

Soprano with orchestra — Soprano Yetzabel Arias Fernandez with La Risonanza directed by Fabio Bonizzoni

The following evening Arias Fernandez appeared to rather better effect in the event at which she was originally scheduled to appear. It took place at Cercles, which played host to all three concerts on 29 July. Performed by La Risonanza under their founder and director Fabio Bonizzoni, the programme was notable for a superb performance of Vivaldi’s trio sonata ‘La Folia’, RV63, a work that can outstay its welcome but one that on this occasion was given with such intensity and sense of fantasy that it gripped the attention from start to finish. Arias Fernandez sang chamber cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti (the splendid Bella madre), Bononcini and Handel’s well-known Armida abbandonata. While the acoustic suited her lustrous voice better than that at Champagne, I still found her apparent inability to curb its power in the upper range disconcerting. Her ornamentation, too, left much to be desired and like so many singers of Baroque music today she has no trill. Given her approach, it was the big Handel cantata that worked best, Arias Fernandez rising well to its dramatic challenge.

Earlier in the day the Austrian ensemble Vivante had presented a compelling programme of Monteverdi tenor duets and solos culled from the 7th and 8th Books of Madrigals and the Scherzi Musicale of 1632. If the singing of neither Tore Tom Denys nor Erik Leidal displayed truly

Monteverdi duets — Tenors Tore Denys & Erik Leidal and Vivante Ensemble

Italianate qualities, both proved themselves to be well versed stylistically, with Leidal showing an edge in this respect, being more confident with ornamentation, while it was Denys who won the plaudits for vocal beauty, Leidal’s lower range tending to be a little grainy. I’ve left until last the concert that quite unexpectedly gave me the most pleasure. This was given by the Accademia Strumentale Italiana and consisted of an exploration in words and music of the world of the commedia dell arte. Music by a wide range of composers stretching alphabetically from the ubiquitous Anonymous to Adrian Willaert was linked by a brilliant performance (in French) by the comedian Lorenzzo Bassotto, exploring the humour, pathos and vulgarity of commedia dell arte with immense panache. The instrumental playing was of high quality, with some wonderfully subtle percussion work by Sbibu. And I’ll nominate the vivacious soprano Elena Bertuzzi as my discovery of the festival. She boasts outstanding technique, a lovely vocal quality and moreover is a real personality who knows instinctively how to communicate to an audience. If she can reach the point where she can sing this programme without the aid of music books, she’ll be even more irresistible.

Brian Robins