by Zachary Woolfe,
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim and James r. Oestreichfeb.
Over the past three weeks,
our critics fanned out over “La Serenissima,” Carnegie Hall’s magisterial dive
into the music of the Venetian Republic. The festival, which ended on Tuesday
with a semi-staged performance of Monteverdi’s 1643 masterpiece, “L’Incoronazione
di Poppea,” included events at both Carnegie and elsewhere in the city; vocal
concerts and strictly instrumental oHnes; sonatas and laments. Over all, a rare
bounty. Here are a few of our impressions.
From left, Avery Amereau,
Cody Quattlebaum and Jacob Scharfman in Handel’s “Agrippina.” Credit Richard
Termine
My three encounters with
“La Serenissima” felt like skipping across a couple of centuries of history.
Appearing on Feb. 12 at Zankel Hall with members of his ensemble Hespèrion XXI,
the early-music magus Jordi Savall presided over a sprightly, feather-light
program that located the roots of Venice’s sounds — later to emerge, thanks to
trading routes, across Europe — in earthy, anonymous dances from the early 16th
century. Mr. Savall’s aim was to chart some of those international paths of
influence, and also to showcase the development of the first instrumental music
composed fully independent of dance or vocal precursors.
It was, in classic Savall
style, a grab bag of tiny, exquisite pieces: aching John Dowland, stately and
swirling Gioseffo Guami. And the climax, in classic Savall style, was a
playful, gently swaying improvisation on a Renaissance “canario” dance melody,
building into flurries of notes frizzling off Mr. Savall’s tiny treble viol.
That closing performance of
“L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” on Feb. 21, propelled me to the middle of the 17th
century. The instrumental textures of this score are still austere — Rinaldo
Alessandrini, the conductor and director of the ensemble Concerto Italiano, has
rejected interventions that beef up the opera’s orchestration — but the range
of feeling has grown, encompassing a sweep from solemnity to bawdiness. Against
Mr. Alessandrini’s intentionally minimal background, the action took on the
quality of a stage play: Declamatory vividness was as important as beauty of
tone. I’m thinking especially of the contralto Sara Mingardo, too little known
in this country, whose voice is like soft, moist, dark earth and whose dignity
and tenderness made Ottone’s melancholy magnetic.
The shift from “Poppea”
(1643) to Vivaldi’s “Juditha Triumphans” (1712, performed on Feb. 7 by Andrea
Marcon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra) is a little like that from
black-and-white to Technicolor. Vivaldi’s orchestra is comparatively huge and
varied — four theorbos! proto-clarinet-ish chalumeaux! — and deployed in ways
that may lack Monteverdi’s emotional sophistication but allow for kaleidoscopic
effects and more modern verve. The vocalism is here more athletically florid
than declamatory, little problem for the fiery mezzo Ann Hallenberg, like Ms.
Mingardo unaccountably obscure in America, and her cast mates.
As my colleague Corinna da
Fonseca-Wollheim wrote as the festival began, it was impossible to avoid the
whiff of politics throughout “La Serenissima.” Trade and internationalism made
Venice’s economic success and culture possible; one of the greatest of all
operatic depictions of power, “Poppea” makes us meditate, as the scholar Ellen
Rosand has written, on “its extraordinary glorification of lust and ambition at
the expense of reason and morality.” These dips into Baroque Venice were
delightful, but they were no escape from our time. ZACHARY WOOLFE
It is salutary, while
hearing the gorgeous, seductive strains of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di
Poppea,” to try to conjure the actual personages and circumstances of the place
and time represented in this historical confection: Rome at the dawning of the
Christian millenniums. Three years after the events of the final scene, which
gloriously depicts Poppea’s coronation and marriage to Nero in A.D. 62, Nero
kicked Poppea in the stomach in a fit of rage, killing her.
“Poppea” was performed by
Concerto Italiano on Tuesday. In the weeks before, the festival threw another
beautiful if unflattering light on the same historical period, Handel’s early
opera “Agrippina,” presented, both in concert and in an overwrought staged
production, by forces of the Juilliard School.
“Agrippina” takes the story
back some years, to Nero’s first marriage — in A.D. 53, to Emperor Claudius’s
daughter Octavia, at the age of 17 — and his ascension to the imperial throne
on Claudius’s death the next year. Here the cynicism and ugly politicking are
impossible to ignore even for a moment, as Agrippina, wife of Claudius and
mother of Nero, plots to place her son (Claudius’s stepson) on the throne,
while much of male Rome, it seems, including Claudius, tries to bed Poppea.
The “Poppea” performance,
with Rinaldo Alessandrini leading his little band of period instrumentalists
and an excellent cast of singers led by Miah Persson and Sara Mingardo, was a
fitting conclusion to a festival that must surely be counted a success in
musical terms. It seems also to have consistently drawn sizable audiences,
though “Poppea,” with its decidedly minimal staging touches, lost many
listeners after intermission. Ah, but what they missed at the end! JAMES R.
OESTREICH
Midway through its concert
of love scenes from Venetian opera on Feb. 14, the period-instrument ensemble
Il Pomo d’Oro performed an instrumental sonata by the 17th-century composer
Dario Castello. On one note the first violinist enacted a sort of extravagant,
slowed-down vibrato that resulted in a quarter-tone wobble. The gesture
injected a hint of Middle Eastern flavor into the music, momentarily troubling
the early-Baroque harmonies in a way that was both beautiful and alienating.
Three days later, sitting
in the same seat at Zankel Hall for the Ahmet Erdogdular Classical Turkish
Music Ensemble, I felt a jolt of déjà vu during an improvised kamancheh solo in
a Sufi hymn. The bowed, almond-shaped kamancheh looks a bit like a violin, but
is held upright on the player’s knee and produces a sandier, more veiled sound
that can be uncannily like a female voice, husky with grief. That vocal quality
came through strongly in Derya Turkan’s soulful improvisation — which included
the same languid oscillation of pitch that had struck me as so oddly expressive
in the Pomo d’Oro concert.
There were no program notes
at either event belaboring the point that Venice owed much of its cultural
riches to its deep engagement with the Ottoman Empire. But by presenting both
excellent ensembles side by side as part of its festival, Carnegie Hall subtly
orchestrated this virtual handshake across cultures, genres and time. CORINNA
da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/arts/music/a-musical-handshake-spanning-centuries-venice-in-new-york.html?_r=0
