A tour of Boston's vocal riches with Boston Baroque

Jeptha's Daughter, by Chauncey Bradley Ives

Boston Baroque's intriguing program last weekend, "De Profundis," marked for this venerable organization a renewed focus on the chorus - and as is often the case for conductor Martin Pearlman, it was also built around a musical argument, a "case," if you will.  To be frank, I found that case not entirely convincing, but it was certainly worth a listen (if only more classical programming could boast Pearlman's intellectual rigor) and what's more, the concert not only resurrected a musical figure who has long been neglected in local performance, but offered a kind of survey of local singers as well.

That neglected musical figure is Giacomo Carissimi - a name well-known to choral enthusiasts, as he taught Charpentier and influenced Handel - but not to the general public (perhaps not even the classical public).  I myself had never experienced Carissimi in performance, so I was grateful to hear Jephte, a masterpiece whose impact is hard to over-estimate (it was held up as a model of the nascent oratorio form, and Handel even quoted it in Samson).

Jephte is most famous for its concluding lamentation, which is riven by daringly plaintive dissonances; but the oratorio proved quite effective - and affecting - throughout its length (I'm often struck by just how quickly a new musical form reaches an artistic peak).  The tale is the Biblical version of a myth that has long served composers well (a Cretan variant provides the core of Idomeneo); Jephtha (one of the judges from Judges) promises in prayer that if he is granted victory in battle, he will sacrifice the first thing he sees upon his return home.  Fans of tragic irony will be unsurprised to learn that his beloved daughter greets him before anyone else at his homecoming (that Yahweh - such a joker!).

Pearlman didn't quite conjure the plunging emotional arc that Carissimi has constructed (Jephte is a roller coaster ride from victorious joy to catastrophic grief), but his work with the chorus, which seemed beefed up for the occasion with many of Boston's best singers, was exemplary, and he drew remarkable solos from Owen McIntosh (who's a bit young for Jephte, but made you forget that), as well as Kamala Soparkar, Brenna Wells, Ulysses Thomas, and particularly the reliable Teresa Wakim, whose pure soprano imbued the doomed daughter's lament with a devastating ache.

The concluding chorus, Plorate, filii Israel, was likewise poignantly intense, and did seem to lead seamlessly into the melancholy dissonances of Charpentier's late mass, Missa, Assumpta est Maria. But to these ears as the Charpentier progressed, Pearlman's argument, thoughtful as it was, slowly fell apart; this composer is simply sui generis, and the ingrown complexity of his structures seemed to quickly leave Carissimi far behind.

Don't get me wrong; Missa, Assumpta est Maria has many fascinations - Charpentier always does - but here, as the mass slowly fractured into a mosaic of interlocking solos, it began to lose momentum (which is unusual for a Pearlman performance).  Luckily most of those solos were nevertheless exquisitely performed, again by Wells, McIntosh, and Thomas, who were joined by Bradford Gleim and Jonas Budris, among others.  The full chorus (along with the orchestra) got to strut its stuff in the gorgeous concluding Agnus Dei and Domine Salvum.

Pearlman then took a brief detour into Bach with the oddly lively Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, an early cantata which is supposed to be a kind of comforting elegy (it was written for a funeral).  It's best known for its spare, transparent accompaniment, but for once the Boston Baroque instrumentalists didn't quite sparkle enough; instead the big news was mezzo Katherine Growdon, who looked terrified to be center stage but sang beautifully nonetheless.

At its close the concert returned to its loose thesis, with one of Handel's well-known Chandos Anthems (No. 8).  After the impacted complexity of the Charpentier, I admit Handel felt like a warm, happy bath (even if these anthems aren't in the top drawer of his achievement, and even if their debt to Carissimi is a vague one). We heard once more from Teresa Wakim and Owen McIntosh, who both again did well, while tenor Mark Sprinkle, who had struggled a bit in the Bach, came more into his own.  But the spotlight was stolen by tenor Jonas Budris, whose confident flights into the vocal stratosphere drew startled applause from the house (Budris pulled the same trick with Handel and Haydn last Christmas).  It was a sweet capstone to an evening that above all else demonstrated how high the local vocal talent can fly.

To hell and back with Boston Early Music Festival

Douglas Williams, Mireille Asselin and ensemble in Hades.

What is period musical performance for?

For its enthusiasts, the answer is simply the beauty of the music itself, which is most authentically conveyed in the language of the instruments for which it was written.  And this argument has proven so convincing over the years that organizations like the BSO - which basically plays on nineteenth-century instruments - has slowly had to shed from its schedule much of the early "classical" repertoire (and some argue should really shed Mozart and Haydn, too).

But when it comes to period opera, things get a bit trickier, and the early music movement must face the issues with which theatrical artists have long since grappled, which perhaps could be summed up as, "How do we stay true to classic values while remaining contemporary, too?"  Given that the major aim of many in the early music movement is to replicate as closely as possible all the original performance conditions of the works in question (whole concert halls are being designed after period models, in fact, and built of "authentic" materials), the attempt to provide contemporary meaning in what amounts to a costume drama can seem almost paradoxical.

But over recent years the brilliant Gilbert Blin, house director at the Boston Early Music Festival, has reliably devised smart, subtle subversions of this apparent contradiction.  Blin isn't really all that interested in period tableaux vivant for its own sake - he's intrigued instead by what it actually tells us about its period, as well as what it tells us about ourselves.  Thus, particularly in his chamber operas, he sets his productions in precise historical moments (sometimes a specific weekend) in which actual historical figures like Alexander Pope or Molière may figure in the action, or even take the stage.  What Blin attempts to conjure is a kind of meta-historical performance, in which something like the period itself appears before us, draped in its own theatrical trappings.


Admittedly, Blin's aim can sometimes wobble (last year's Dido was a bit of a mixed bag), but his ideas are always suggestive, and at any rate he was firing on all cylinders this year, with a double bill of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs that transfixed audiences at BEMF last weekend.  The musical performance was always exemplary, Blin's elegantly simple staging was often haunting, and the historical metaphors he teased from the material were pleasingly resonant.  My only regret was that the production had only two performances; like his great Acis and Galatea, this is another Blin masterpiece that deserves to tour.

Aaron Sheehan as Orpheus

Blin's first brainstorm was an inspired gambit to get around the fact that, to put it bluntly, we've lost the last act of Charpentier's Orphée; the extant manuscript simply ends with Orpheus and Eurydice groping their way together out of Hades - before the final tragedy that dashes their romantic dreams a second time. To explain this gap, Blin has nestled the larger opera within a kind of operatic short subject - La Couronne de Fleurs, Charpentier's prologue to Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire, a satire which, believe it or not, opened at the court of Louis XIV with an opera and ballet attached.

La Couronne de Fleurs is a fairly simple set of ditties in which Flora asks her friends (who happen to be nymphs and shepherdesses, of course) to compose odes to Louis XIV's grandeur. The ensuing concert is eventually cut off by the god Pan, however, who explains that it's pointless; try as they might, they can never do justice to the big guy himself. Blin's conceit is that Orphée is part of this brief performance - with Pan's interruption explaining the loss of the third act. Okay, we're never quite sure how Orpheus precisely maps to Louis, but in general the opposition of these two works is hauntingly resonant; Flora recalls Proserpine, the nymph of spring confined to Pluto's court in winter, and of course poor Molière departed for the underworld himself after a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, never to return.  Blin even dresses Pan as one of Louis's courtiers - hinting that what is being silenced is not just Orphée but Charpentier himself (who soon fell from favor before the rising star of Lully).

So Blin's meta-opera is like a wreath of historic and artistic allusions to love and death - it keeps ramifying subtly in our consciousness even as we watch.  And luckily the director seems to know his ideas are so strong he can keep his staging to an exquisite, evocative minimum - while what design touches he does choose often perform double thematic duty: Flora's ring of roses around the musical consort, for instance (at top), could serve as either a bouquet for Eurydice's wedding or her funeral; likewise, the ghostly shades in Hell wander about in bridal veils.  And I'll never forget Eurydice and Orpheus's slow, sombre march (almost touching) out of the auditorium as Charpentier's gorgeous farewell song unfolded.  In this truncated Orphée, of course, they seem to get away - Orpheus never turns, and Eurydice is never lost again to Hades; death is suspended; it is only in "life" itself (as opposed to "art") that their story is interrupted, and their love destroyed.

Of course the ensemble of talented musicians and vocalists BEMF has by now attracted had a lot to do with the success of the production, too. Local star Aaron Sheehan made a clarion, committed Orphée, but he faced stiff vocal competition from Douglas Williams's powerful Pluton (whose bass notes indeed seemed to scrape the roof of the underworld) as well as Olivier Laquerre's bemused, lyrical Apollo. Meanwhile Mireille Asselin made a delightfully ripe Flora, and Carrie Henneman Shaw a startlingly moving Eurydice; indeed, her death scene, which I've seen dozens of times in countless versions of the myth, gripped me here as it never had before. The chorus was likewise in fine form, with subtle solo turns from Jason McStoots, Michael Kelly and Brenna Wells. The instrumentalists were equally dazzling, under the direction of resident early-music geniuses Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs. The entire production cohered admirably; my only regret regarding it was that it only played for two nights (and over the Thanksgiving weekend, no less)! Perhaps, if the gods smile once more on Orpheus, it will get a second chance at theatrical life.

Tea Lobo, Mireille Asselin and the chorus join Orpheus in song.

A very Charpentier Christmas

I've been meaning for some time (I know, I keep saying that!) to catch up with the Musicians of the Old Post Road (the core instrumental ensemble, at left), but didn't get a chance to until their charming Christmas concert last weekend at Emmanuel Church.

The evening was entirely given over to Marc-Antoine Charpentier (below right), a French Baroque composer perhaps most famous for his Messe de minuit pour noël - which, despite being quite well-known, and obviously written for the Christmas season, was not on this program in any form. Go figure. Luckily, Charpentier wasn't a one-trick pony - in fact his oeuvre includes several operas, ballets, and even some incidental music for Molière - and this versatility was evident in the lesser-known, but still charming, carols and sacred music the Musicians of the Old Post Road had chosen to perform.

During his life, this accomplished composer dwelt in the rather antagonistic shadow of the more august Lully, but in some ways he's more historically important than the designated court composer to Louis XIV (he introduced many features of Italian music to France, for instance, which Lully resisted - even though he himself was Italian!).  And of late, thanks to increasing interest from period ensembles, Charpentier has begun to come into his own again in terms of performance.

The Musicians of the Old Post Road gave a good sense of why.  Charpentier has a way of sneaking up on you, almost on tip-toe, with surprisingly complex musical and emotional experiences.  Everything on last weekend's program was fairly small in scale, and often cut with a gently sweet sense of melancholy  (imagine - melancholic holiday music!), but also gave a sense of a deliberate, gentle unfolding of musical richness.  His In nativitatem Domini canticum (H 416) was in particular a near-marvel of subtle drama; its encounter between the shepherds and the angels hinted at haunting depths of uncertainty before lifting off into a delicate song of joy.  There were other, similarly lyrical surprises throughout the program, always embedded in simple structures that through careful, steady development revealed surprising depths.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier

The instrumentalists of the Old Post Road were always up to these challenges, and played buoyantly, and at times with a dancing lilt that would have done Boston Baroque proud.  Cellist Daniel Ryan and traverso flutist Suzanne Stumpf are the artistic directors of the group, but in performance the ensemble's core seemed to be violinists Sarah Darling and "guest star" Jesse Irons, who played with remarkable sympathy and spirit.  The ensemble played with its best unity, however, whenever cellist Ryan led the way with one of Charpentier's beautiful, deceptively simple, ground basses.

The vocalists were a bit more variable, although everyone sang with sensitivity - and their blended sound was surprisingly good.  The strongest impressions, however, were made by tenor Matthew Anderson and (especially) baritone Aaron Engebreth, who sang with power as well as feeling.  People often bemoan the lack of true Christmas spirit in the entertainment offerings of the holiday season, and of course they're often right to - but can you really expect to find the true meaning of Christmas at the Radio City Christmas Spectacular?  The very idea is bizarre.   Meanwhile our church sanctuaries and halls have been hosting holiday programs from our local choruses and fine small ensembles (like the Musicians of the Old Post Road) that have brimmed with the very spirit we claim we miss.  Of course it's not necessarily a simplistically merry or "feel-good" spirit, because Christmas isn't a simplistic holiday, and human connection, much less human connection to the divine, is a very complicated thing.  In his subtle way, Charpentier reminds us of that.