United States Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine , English Baroque Soloists, The Monteverdi Choir, Sir John Eliot Gardiner (conductor), Carnegie Hall, New York, 30.4.2015 (SSM)
Monteverdi: L’Orfeo, English Baroque Soloists, The Monteverdi Choir, Sir John Eliot Gardiner (conductor), Carnegie Hall, New York, 1.5 4.2015 (SSM) Soloists for Vespro della Beata Vergine
Francesca Aspromonte, Soprano
Francesca Boncompagni, Soprano
Mariana Flores, Soprano
Krystian Adam, Tenor
Nicholas Mulroy, Tenor
Andrew Tortise, Tenor
Alex Ashworth, Baritone
Robert Davies, Baritone
Gianluca Buratto, Bass
Soloists for L’Orfeo
Francesca Aspromonte, Soprano
Francesca Boncompagni, Soprano
Esther Brazil, Soprano
Mariana Flores, Soprano
James Hall, Countertenor
John Lattimore, Countertenor
Krystian Adam, Tenor
Nicholas Mulroy, Tenor
Andrew Tortise, Tenor
Gareth Treseder, Tenor
Alex Ashworth, Baritone
Gianluca Buratto, Bass
David Shipley, Bass
The highlight of Carnegie Hall’s Before Bach series has to have been the finale: two evenings devoted to Monteverdi with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the English Baroque Soloists and The Monteverdi Choir. Both concerts were sold out, or nearly so. This speaks to both the charisma of Gardiner and to the taste of New Yorkers. Classical music, we are told, is moribund, of interest only to the old and gray, but there were plenty of young people in attendance. After both concerts there were standing ovations, and the enthusiastic applause went on and on.
It was even more impressive that the audience was so tuned in to the music because the works are far from your typical fare. This was music outside the usual Baroque-to-21st-century repertory. Carnegie might fill a house just by mentioning Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. But here we had two nights of uncompromising music, nearly two hours each without intermission, with works written 400 years ago and 75 years before Bach was born. There are no catchy tunes, and some of the instruments are ones that many have never seen or even heard. And what vocal sounds these singers produced, ranging from recitative secco to roulades, and filled with challenging ornaments and melismas.
Precision is the keyword for Gardiner’s playing style. This is a man whose 620-page study, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, is as detailed as any scholar’s lifetime work. With musical direction as well, Gardiner leaves nothing out, nothing is unstudied, and he is peerless in his control of all the forces at hand. More of an effort was required to keep things together in L’Orfeo then in Vespro, which had no acting or dancing. Vespro is church music, L’Orfeo is theater music
This precision also applies to the logistics of how and where Gardiner placed the instrumentalists and the soloists. During the echo stanzas in L’Orfeo’s “Questi i campi di Tracia, e questo è il loco,” the respondent sang from a back balcony. As individuals moved to the forefront or to join other groups, each reached his or her goal at precisely the right time by walking at a slow, studied pace. Although Gardiner is known to be a difficult conductor in terms of rehearsing, he clearly and equitably managed to give every member of the choir a turn either as soloist or as part of a small ensemble.
But logistics must come naturally to Gardiner, who conquered a logistical nightmare in his project to perform and record 198 Bach cantatas at different churches in 50 cities and 13 countries around the world. Having completed 22 discs for Deutsche Gramophon, he asked them to finance a pilgrimage in which he would record the cantatas to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. DGG refused, but Gardiner managed to make the financial arrangements and go ahead. He recorded them for his own label, Soli deo Gloria, named after Bach’s inscription near his signature on most of his works.
If the second evening’s concert version of L’Orfeo did not completely succeed, that is only in comparison to the first night’s VDBV, which was truly phenomenal. Well-versed in performance practices of the period, all the singers and instrumentalists excelled. There was no lack of variety here, given Monteverdi’s inclusion of so many forms or practices: recitatives, motets, chants and modal music, at times contrapunctal and harmonic, and at other times sharply dissonant. Gardiner followed the constraints and liberties that Monteverdi himself took to bring music into the Baroque era.
Vespro was an evening of pure music but, obviously, it didn’t reveal Monteverdi’s talent as a dramatist. L’Orfeo, done here in semi-concert style, gave a taste of what a full Monteverdi opera production delivers. In 1999, Trisha Brown offered a production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and it was a rare staging, filled with wonderful costumes and clever effects. But Gardiner’s L’Orfeo, with its stylized choreography, particularly the slow walking with arms stiffly held or hands awkwardly lifted, reminded me of another Orpheus tale: Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, staged by Robert Wilson and conducted by Sir John himself, where the same walking style was used.
One has to give credit to the young singers from the choir who took up the difficult task of acting out the opera in a less-than-inviting stage setup, working splendidly in the restricted space carved out for them around and between the musicians.
Stan Metzger