Showing posts with label Handel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Handel. Show all posts

Monday, 14 December 2015

A supple rendition of Messiah from a modern orchestra and its chorus

This reviews Messiah, performed by Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 December (link to additonal review added, 22 December)

This is a review of Messiah, performed in Cambridge by Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices at West Road Concert Hall, conducted by Eamonn Dougan and led by Thomas Gould, on Tuesday 14 December at 7.30 p.m.





Part I

Adeptly keeping the movements ‘ticking over’ was one of the many strengths of this performance by Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) and Britten Sinfonia Voices, under the leadership of Thomas Gould (@ThomasGouldVLN) and the baton of Eamonn Dougan (@ejdougan).
With, for example, the recitative for accompanied bass ‘For behold, darkness shall cover the earth’, which runs into an air for bass voice (Robert Davies), the transition was smooth, and both from one movement to the next, and within them, the orchestra evoked a feeling of chiaroscuro that matched a text that told of the people that walked in darkness having seen a great light. Many believe that Charles Jennens, the librettist of Messiah (HWV 56), was also that of Israel in Egypt (HWV 54), which was premiered three years earlier, to the month (almost to the day), and one cannot easily forget the like moment when Israel is still in captivity*, and Pharaoh and the Egyptian people being visited by plagues…


In the following Chorus, ‘For unto us a Child is born’, one both experienced something like that halo effect, from a core group of instrumentalists, that one associates with Bach’s St Matthew Passion (BWV 244), and noticed how neatly the bowing and the turns, according to Thomas Gould’s example, were executed : in his writing, Handel has musically prepared us for the change of focus and for the pastoral mood that ushers in the nativity. Here, then, he gives us nothing more elaborate than a cadence, and no word-painting, at the end of the accompanied soprano recitative, when the shepherds were sore afraid.

 Nicely pacing the further sections of recitative, with these familiar Christmas passages from Luke’s gospel, Carolyn Sampson made us ready to be greeted by trumpets – and, nice though it can be to hear the expertise of playing a natural horn, we had the warm assurance that we were not going to get split-notes or wavering pitch from Paul Archibald and Jo Harris :




When, following this moment, Carolyn Sampson finally came to an air, ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion’, the string ensemble that we heard with her was nimble, and her voice was honeyed, with only a little vibrato in the higher register. Straight after, alto Iestyn Davies had a recitative, and then an air, and there seemed to be a tranquillity not just to such words as He shall feed His flock like a shepherd ; and He shall gather the lambs with His Arm, but to his voice itself. In another air, Sampson employed a little coloratura, and then there was a Chorus that closed Part I.



Part II

In the alto air ‘He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows’, following a short initial Chorus, Iestyn Davies was superbly judged as to pacing, and depth of tone – in a movement that is best with a careful and controlled overview, it was a delight to hear an approach gained from an experience of operatic roles put to good use.

As noted below (in the second paragraph, below, concerning Part III), and with Gould’s skilled leading, Dougan had chosen to emphasize the concerto feel in Handel’s score, probably in conjunction with how portamento was employed in the alto part. Thus, there were longer bow-strokes, but also Spring-like flourishes, and, with the string-colour, they made an excellent match with the celebrated purity of Davies’ timbre.


Particularly in the Chorus ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’, Emma Feilding and Jessica Mogridge beautifully interpreted the writing for oboe, which one was excellently placed to hear**. The size of the orchestra (and of the venue) means that one can appreciate it as a pervasive aspect (rather than Handel’s occasionally using brass), which makes for a very significant part of the sound of the work. (It has not been noticed before, but, in the Kyrie of the Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626), is Mozart making a reference to Messiah here, with his choice of fugal-subject ?)


In an important sequence linked by tenor voice, two passages of accompanied recitative (the first was heard with vibrant, angular strings) led up to a very modern-sounding air. Before it, in the second section of recitative, Allan Clayton movingly gave us the hollow feeling of the Messiah in the situation described by the text, and in the deepening of the hurt, with the repeated words in the second half of the sentence :

 Thy rebuke hath broken His heart ; He is full of heaviness
The second air, after even more desolate words from Isaiah (He was cut off out of the land of the living ; for the transgressions of Thy people was He stricken), reapplies them prophetically, and the gospel perspective accordingly changes the viewpoint completely to the divine one (with But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell, nor didst Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption).

Although there is brief refreshment in the lovely soprano air ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace’, in which we felt solace through Sampson’s voice, Part II continues, and concludes, in a less personal vein of theology in global terms : the refusal of God’s authority, rebellion against his rule, and the vanquishment of the rebels (when the libretto has ‘the Lord shall have them in derision’, Dougan had that laughter in the strings). Victory and a celebratory frame of mind are part of the pattern here.

 From the perspective of the Hanoverians, the way in which, just four years later, The Jacobite Rebellion was to be bloodily put down would be seen just in these terms, beginning by how it ended disastrously for the Jacobite cause at The Battle of Culloden (on 16 April 1746, again almost to the day).

In this performance of Part II, the Chorus 'Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth', with which it concludes, was attended with great dignity, but avoiding the not unusual sense of pomp (or, as far as one was aware, people standing in some sort of patriotic erectness), which can draw too much notice to the form, rather than the intention, of the libretto. A modest pause then preceded Part III.



Part III

 Maybe it was no more than having stayed three times near Fishamble Street in Dublin, and been taken, during a literary guided walk, to the site of the Great Music Hall there where Messiah had first been performed (on 13 April 1742), but there seemed to be an Irishness, in the lilt of the voice, and tone of the instrumentalists, to the famous soprano air that starts Part III, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’. Sampson was radiant, as she had been throughout the evening, and clearly relished embodying conviction in this number.

 In the opening alto air from Part II, one had been struck by the impression of early concerto-writing, with Dougan and Gould bringing out variations in attack and feeling between adjoining passages (please see the second paragraph, above, concerning Part II) : here, the delivery was much more legato, and with delicate flourishes. Continuing with the Chorus ‘Since by man came death’, we had contrasts in mood from soft to declamatory, as between ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ – within each half of the two scriptural sentences, and between them.


When it came, soon after, to the equally famous ‘The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’, trumpeter Paul Archibald perfectly accommodated the bass voice of Robert Davies, and in an ensemble whose sound had been integrated and equitably balanced all evening. A peculiarity of the setting (which was one aspect that the pre-concert discussion had addressed, though not this specific point) is the dual rendering of the word ‘raised’ here (and of other words earlier***), a question to which one was made alert from having read Claire Tomalin’s biography of one-time Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift.

When we first hear ‘raised’ in this bass air, it is as a one-syllable word : Tomalin tells us that, in Swift and Handel’s time, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a literary battle had raged, whether to make it the convention that such a word as ‘raised’, when the –ed ending is not separately sounded, should always be written ‘rais’d’. (With ‘sounded’ itself of course, used in the last sentence, there can be no doubt, because it inevitably has two syllables : in this sentence, then, if those arguing for the convention had not failed, we would now write ‘us’d’****.)

 To recap, when we first (and also in the repeat) hear the words ‘the dead shall be raised’, the word is one syllable, but, when Handel jumps straight back to focus on a shorter part of the phrase, he makes it two syllables. (Indeed, and as we may be used to in choral singing, look through the libretto of Messiah, and, in most words with an –ed ending, it is sounded.) No doubt musicologists have theorized why that is so in the case of this pairing, but the effect appears to be this : that we notice the word less the first time, but, when it immediately reappears in this two-syllable form, it allows Handel to dwell on it with the voice, and draw attention to it as an action.


The soprano air ‘If God be for us, who can be against us’ is the last item with a soloist in Messiah, and this was a very special moment. Not uniquely, the Sinfonia reduced here to a small group of instruments (which was probably Caroline Dearnley on cello, Benjamin Russell (bass), Stephen Farr (organ), with leader Thomas Gould), since one can hear other examples of this sort of treatment (or even, for example, see soprano Lynne Dawson here, with an ensemble [the clip has no acknowledgements] where, in much younger days, Stephen Cleobury is the conductor (but here just brings the players in)).

However, in playing obbligato for this air, Gould brought so much more expressiveness than in that example, and such sensitivity to playing to accord with Carolyn Sampson and her voice, that the experience was a thing of beauty : with one’s unquestioned mainstay for the piece in the group of Sinfonia players, the sense of adventurousness, even riskiness, in his playing, and how it fitted to her artistry, was compelling. As one says, the moment was very special, and (as, in contrast to those, say, in the St Matthew) it then almost made Handel’s task harder in achieving the effect of the concluding Choruses :

Given post-mediaeval precedents such as Palestrina, Handel is not the first person to set the single word Amen as a movement, but he is scarcely writing in that musical tradition (unless we remember that we are in Dublin ?). Yet does he do so here at such length that it might feel like pastiche (if not, maybe, an extended musical-joke ?) – certainly to begin with, and partly in relation to what preceded, one did wonder.





Possibly one is always wise to wonder, a little, at Handel and his exact motives, but in time the Chorus did build beyond feeling as though it were an exercise, and made an impressive and agreeable end to this evening with Carolyn Sampson, Iestyn Davies, Allan Clayton, Robert Davies, Eamonn Dougan, Thomas Gould, and the whole of Britten Sinfonia and Britten Sinfonia Voices.








End-notes

 * Moses is, of course, looked to as a precursor to the figure of Christ, and likewise the deliverance from bondage and across The Red Sea.

** It is always nice to listen out for Sarah Burnett’s contribution, as the Sinfonia’s principal bassoonist, but doing so is made easier when there is a visual link, and podium and other players intervened this time.

*** For example, in the first Chorus in Part I (just after the air for tenor ‘Every valley shall be exalted’), when we first hear the words And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, that final word ‘revealed’ is two syllables, but it is then sounded as just one.

**** On account of how the dispute became resolved for ordinary writing (if not for scores), we now write raiséd, when we wish to indicate that it is two sounds, but our norm is not to put ‘rais’d’ for one (although one will find that form appearing in texts that have not been modernized when edited).

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 27 October 2014

La Bretagna all'Italiana - or La Serenissima in Cambridge (Part I)

A review of La Serenissima's concert, performing with Mhairi Lawson at Trinity College, Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 October

This (over)lengthy review is of a Cambridge Early Music concert given by La Serenissima, with soprano Mhairi Lawson, in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, on Monday 13 October

The programme for the evening was entitled La Bretagna all’Italiana, and La Serenissima (@LaSerenissimaUK) was led (and introduced), as ever, by violinist Adrian Chandler (@AdeSerenissima), with Mhairi Lawson (soprano), Gareth Deats (cello), Robert Howarth (harpsichord), and Eligio Quinteiro (theorbo) – the ensemble’s full complement of players, on which Adrian calls for Vivaldi concerti and the like, is given on the beautifully presented web-site, at http://laserenissima.co.uk/about/*


Introductory

For the purposes of this review (NB This gushing overdue posting is just for the first half), Adrian Chandler is styled ‘Adrian’, because one simply must do so after having been to The Eagle on a couple of occasions with Gareth (and Robert ?) and him…


The first of which was after those three, as a trio, gave their Pisendel recital during one Cambridge Summer Music Festival, material founded in the original ‘Per Monsieur Pisendel’ album (which now has a tempting-looking sequel – Santa, please note !) : an intriguing story, fascinatingly told by Adrian between the pieces (and in the CD booklet), of the expert violinist who turned composer with the help of Antonio Vivaldi, one Johann Georg Pisendel, who rightly deserves – as La Serenissima believes – to be better known.



On that occasion, La Serenissima was not, as it has sometimes done, giving an all-Vivaldi performance (though he is ever present), and that was a link with this recent Cambridge recital – along with Adrian’s continuing search for rarities, star works by other composer / violinists (Pisendel being but one) that we may not otherwise (tend to) hear.


Opening half

Programme

1. Due Canzoni da Battello ~ Anon. (c. 1730)

2. Sonata Scozzese ~ Francesco Maria Veracini (1690–1768)

3. A Scots Cantata ~ William Boyce (1711–1779)

4. Sonata II in D Major (‘Manchester’), RV. 12 ~ Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)


Mhairi Lawson began by singing two (1) Canzoni da Battello – and two further ones began the Closing half (write-up in progress), all thought to date to around 1730. At this time (and from the late seventh century until 1797), Venice was still a Republic : Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia – or just La Serenissima, from where the band takes its name**.

In the solo violin introduction to Si la gondola avere, Adrian brought out a sweetness of tone, which heralded richness in Mhairi’s voice, itself a contrast to the robust, yet delicate theorbo, before a close with violin again. In the second piece, Cara Nina el bon to sesto, Mhairi gave us more lightness, and the overall impression, with theorbo accompaniment, was less formal than in the opening song.


Neither of these Canzoni is attributed (please see next paragraph), and they typically have texts in Venetian dialect (as Adrian tells us in his programme-notes). Since he is necessarily mentally and historically rooted in Venice, Adrian provided much detail in the programme, but one also wanted to heed these short numbers – and their lyrics, fleeting as the may-fly, for there was little or none of the ruminative word-setting that we know from Handel or Bach. (And one knew that one could read over his notes later, in serene tranquillity !)


Afterwards, Adrian told us that these pieces survive, both in collections in manuscript form (in libraries, music colleges, etc.), and because they made their way into three volumes published, in London, by John Walsh (in the 1740s). (The notes tell us that there are occasional, usually sole, compositions that give Hasse, Pergolesi or Lampugani as their author.)


Adrian introduced the (2) Sonata Scozzese by outlining how Veracini migrated to London from Florence in the 1730s, and, through playing in the Entr’acte of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, came to write this piece, with its Scotch snaps, and its variations on Tweeside.

Scored for the quartet of instrumentalists, the sonata is led by the violin (rather than its having a solo part), and opens with what sounds like Scottish intonation, before becoming more Italianate – quite an extended movement, reminiscent of the dance.

Formally, there is an Adagio between the Allegro moderatamente and the final Scozzese, but it appeared to be run together with the latter, and was – not least in comparison with the Allegro – fairly brief. The Scozzese is marked Un poco andante e affettuoso – Largo – Un poco andante e affettuoso :

Before the Scots tune was stated, the movement was characterized by deft down-strokes in, and hesitancy about, the violin-writing, and it then developed with the feel of ‘The Pipes’, and with the bow skating on Adrian’s strings. In the Largo section, a little akin to that in Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 4 in F Minor***, Op. 8 (RV 297, ‘Inverno’ (‘Winter’)), there was an inward, reflective mood given by the solo violin, before we moved back to the opening theme proper at the work’s close.

In and through hearing these pieces, and seeing – if quick enough – Adrian’s agile finger- and bow-work, we witnessed how a variety of techniques and effects for violin are part of this repertoire. As, in different ways, no doubt Béla Bartók places demands on his soloist in, say, his Violin Concerto No. 2 (BB 117) – or Johann Sebastian Bach in his Partita No. 3 in C Major (whose works in this set of Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, BWV 1001–1006, partly inspired Bartók’s own Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB 124). However, of course, delving around in and then interpreting eighteenth-century (or earlier ?) treatises on string-playing is all part of the groundwork for what we hear in performance…


Mhairi stepped up again from sitting at the side of the chapel for Boyce’s (3) A Scots Cantata – maybe, when Tom Stoppard was giving us Vienna in a craze for things Scots in his adaptation On the Razzle, that seemed a little unlikely (albeit a century later, in 1842). However, it is clear from what is in this programme that something Caledonian was afoot in London in the first half of the eighteenth century****, which the local and (as Adrian puts it) ‘imported’ composers strove to serve.

Having duly referenced the recent vote ‘north of the border’, Adrian observed that the form is essentially recitative / aria – twice. Although being Scottish may have made Mhairi’s construing her text easier, it was the least of her qualifications to perform this piece when singers’ meat and drink is conveying meaning through a tongue that is likely to be unfamiliar to much of the audience – and many may relish settings of, for example (for this is not), Burns without being able to understand every nuance.

Even so, these central words (set in the second section of recitative), probably deliberately, pose no problem to following what is happening :

These tender notes did a’ her pity move, with melting heart she listened to the boy;
o’ercome she smil’d and promis’d him her love; he in return thus sang his rising joy.

Jeanny’s reaction, then, is the pivotal moment, the impetus for Jonny’s vigorous rejoicing in the second aria, where the scoring for voice dwelt on the phrase ‘dear enchanting bliss’ as the undulating accompaniment held the tune.


Regarding why the work that closed the first half, Vivaldi’s (4) Sonata for Violin and Continuo, RV 12, is numbered amongst what are called The ‘Manchester’ Sonatas, Adrian was quick to say that Vivaldi never came to England, but that the third largest collection in the world has ended up in that city, in the Henry Watson Library (for reasons that his notes and he went into…).

It opened tenderly, with a Preludio – Largo, but became spiky and quasi-military, before seeming to resemble the counter-tenor aria ‘Erbarme dich’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion***** (BWV 244). Next, the Corrente – Allegro, full of energy from the off, with accents and a rising scale. Later, a falling figure and highly fluid solo writing in this movement left one feeling full of excitable emotion.

The following Giga – Allgero repeated and developed its initial phrase, progressing a bit as an eight-bar blues might. Yet what was most noticeable, other than Vivaldi’s typical employment of a driving violin style, was his use of ornament and emphasis. Throughout the movement, Gareth and Adrian were in visual interplay to give and receive cues, a noticeable feature of the close ensemble of La Serenissima (as well as seeing pleasure shared on Gareth’s face in reaction to some turn, or phrasing).

To close, the Gavotta – Presto was firmly in il prete rosso’s rhythmic style, and seemed to revisit the theme from the first movement. Not beyond being crafty with our expectations, and after laying a false trail as to where he was going, Vivaldi used the note that he had set up to springboard a coda in conclusion of the piece.


Audience reception and interval

Music this good (score and playing) is infectious ! One need not just have judged the effect of this performance by the applause, for the CD stall – with Adrian taking almost no break before signing – was very busy, and with an impressive range of titles (at least one per year since the group started).

Adrian was heard to say about a very good relationship with Avie Records, and that, in almost all cases, La Serenissima itself owns rights to the recordings, and can thus keep them in circulation (i.e. it could prevent titles being deleted).

Some time soonish, a companion posting will attempt to complete a write-up of the second half without being so novelistic...


End-notes

* Through elision, a URL that looks for all the world, on a quick glance, as though it is for some dubious suppository that involves lasers ?!

** Unless one has been there, it is hard to describe how glorious it is.

*** From, of course, a set of twelve concerti in all, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention), Op. 8 – of which, Concerto No. 7 in D Minor, RV 242, is known as Per Pisendel.

**** From the Internet, it seems that Boyce was not alone in setting this material, for we have one Signior Lorenzo Bocchi’s composition, ‘The Tune after an Italian Manner’.

***** Asked in the interval, Adrian could not place Ebarme dich (which one dared not try to hum / whistle), but said that it must be coincidence, on the basis that he understands that Bach did not know the Vivaldi piece.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 3 March 2012

James Bowman pronounces: Most Handel operas have stupid plots

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 March

I'm not sure (maybe, now, he, too, isn't sure) why he had to share this opinion to introduce a duet from, I think, the last Act of Riccardo Primo, but, he excepted only Giulio Cesare and Ariodante.

Which, I believe, is a little hard on:

Acis and Galatea (about a poster for which he made another joke) - why shouldn't a jealous giant, in love with one, kill the other?

Teseo, because Medea is such a great, wild and torn character, and the things that she does are of legendary status, and what is wrong with the Theseus story?

Likewise Alcestis, for why should not Ruggiero, very much modelled on Odysseus and his wanderings, be unwittingly enslaved by enchantments - a paradigm for love, after all?


And so one could go on - I don't disagree with Bowman that the music is great, but where is the evidence that the libretto / story is so unworthy that Handel must have composed with an eye to the money, not the power of the piece*?

For, if the da capo arias really did have such little merit in terms of a story not worth advancing, I really do find it hard to believe that Handel's audience would, throughout his opera career, have been so often duped. Whereas I honestly believe that word of mouth and personal recommendation, then as now, are so much a part of whether a run closes early that the success that he enjoyed should give us pause in the face of Bowman's dimissal:

Really, when Bowman himself boasted of how many Handel roles he has played, isn't he, not Handel, the cynical one, if he thinks them so much trash...?


End-notes

* Is the opinon, one wonders, based on anything better than having seen the highly unflattering portrait of the composer in Farinelli (il Castrato) (1994)?

(The film gives, by contrast, much evidence of the beauty of the music and of Farinell's (imagined) voice, against the background of hard-nosed competition and ruthless business deals, the depiction (whether or not invention) of the latter of which may easily influence for the worse against our notion of Handel the man.)


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