Category: Festival-conference

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.

[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

Dordogne, France – 28-31 July 2016

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.

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.

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

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

Photographs: © Jean-Michel Bale (Itinéraire Baroque)