REVIEW: L’ARPEGGIATA OPENS BEFORE BACH FESTIVAL AT CARNEGIE HALL

By JAMES R. OESTREICH
 

Nuria Rial singing with the Paris early-music ensemble L’Arpeggiata in “L’Amore Innamorato: Arias by Francesco Cavalli,” at Carnegie Hall as part of the Before Bach festival. Credit Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times 

L’Arpeggiata, a superb Paris early-music ensemble with a quirky sensibility, opened Carnegie Hall’s groundbreaking 25-day festival Before Bach this week with concerts in Zankel Hall focusing on Cavalli and Purcell. But there were also unexpected cameo appearances by old masters of another sort: Led Zeppelin and Leonard Cohen.

Led Zeppelin sneaked in deftly on Tuesday evening, with a lick from “Stairway to Heaven” as part of an improvisation by L’Arpeggiata’s double bassist, Boris Schmidt. But Mr. Cohen’s “Hallellujah” appeared in all its glory, as an encore on Wednesday.

In some ways, L’Arpeggiata represents the state of the art in early-music practice today. During a period of experimentation in the 1950s and ’60s, centering largely on very early music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the need for conjecture to fill out the barest of sources was recognized and reveled in by the likes of Noah Greenberg. When Baroque music came to the forefront in the 1970s, with ostensibly complete performing materials more readily available, a certain literalism set in. Scores that had often been hastily and sketchily produced were widely considered sufficient, definitive, even sacrosanct.

The most compelling performers today have come to realize how much was left unsaid by composers in scores prepared on the run for use by performing colleagues who were, if not immediately at hand, at least immersed in the style of the period and locale. These performers see conjecture not as a worrisome chore but as an opportunity; improvisation as a matter of course; invention as a necessity.

L’Arpeggiata showed those traits in abundance in a delightful program on Tuesday, “L’Amore Innamorato: Arias by Francesco Cavalli,” picking up where it had left off in its Carnegie Perspectives residency at Zankel Hall three years ago. Nuria Rial, a splendid Spanish soprano, sang numbers from operas including “Calisto,” “Didone” and “Ormindo” beautifully, and the ensemble filled out the 75-minute program with instrumental ditties by Cavalli and others.

The selections tended toward works with variations above repeating bass figures, which come as catnip to these players, inviting, as they do, the extemporization of new variations. Such forms are widespread in the Italian Baroque literature, and the piece the ensemble chose for both programs was a ciaccona (chaconne, an evolving dance) not by Cavalli but by Maurizio Cazzati.

Cavalli’s operas have been gaining fitful exposure in recent years, with “Giasone” heard in New York in 2011 and “Eliogabalo” in 2013, and “Veremonda, l’Amazzone di Aragona” about to appear at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C. Still, his music is not well known, and it was good to hear these delicious samples in something like their original form.

Wednesday’s program, “Music for a While: Improvisations on Henry Purcell,” was rather different. Purcell’s music is more familiar, or at least most of the numbers here were. So L’Arpeggiata could perhaps be forgiven for taking a looser approach to the music (though not forgiven by one listener, who stalked out, shouting a protest, during the opening number, actually not Purcell but that reused Cazzati ciaccona).

Avid fan as I am of L’Arpeggiata, even I cringed at a number of the jazzy Purcell arrangements. Always sophisticated and pointedly anachronistic but often New Age-y and toothless, they robbed Purcell’s songs of their essential simplicity.

Nowhere was that deficit more painful than in Dido’s lament, “When I am laid in earth,” from “Dido and Aeneas.” Ms. Rial’s lovely rendering of the text was followed by a dog-wagging coda with virtually all the instrumentalists taking turns, ultimately reducing the great, soulful aria to the level of a lounge ballad.

Ms. Rial shared the vocal numbers in this 90-minute program with the male alto Vincenzo Capezzuto, and alas, I — alone, to judge from the audience response — couldn’t develop a taste for his boyish, bodiless sound. Also a dancer, he displayed fancy footwork in an encore, a pizzica (traditional dance).

Even where you might have wished to hear less from the instrumentalists, you had to salute their finesse and bravura. Christina Pluhar, L’Arpeggiata’s artistic director, played theorbo throughout, giving a wonderful, firm basis to the sound.

Doron Sherwin was sensational, as always, on the cornetto, an ungainly wooden forerunner of the trumpet and an unlikely vehicle for such consummate virtuosity. Veronika Skuplik was his excellent partner on violin. David Mayoral was fine on percussion, and Gianluigi Trovesi on clarinet.

L’Arpeggiata’s quest to add appropriate complexity and texture to music left bare-bones by composers is most often admirable and scintillating, as in the Cavalli. But, as in the Purcell, it risks at times giving short shrift to the virtue of simplicity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/arts/music/review-larpeggiata-opens-before-bach-festival-at-carnegie-hall.html?ref=music&_r=0