Intimate Christmas Splendor

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Of the great Christian holidays, Christmas affords composers perhaps the greatest range between grandeur and simplicity. At one end, the whole of Creation rejoices; at the other, a tiny infant in a hovel is the linchpin of all things. The Christmas music we are most likely to encounter in concert this time of year is of the resplendently rejoicing sort, yet some ensembles have given thought to music of a more intimate kind.

With Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra — known for grand 18th-century Christmas programs — dipping into Magnificat’s 17th-century home territory with a Schütz-centered program Saturday night at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, Magnificat itself, around the corner at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, offered an Italian program on a yet smaller scale. Soprano Catherine Webster and a handful of instrumentalists performed three solo cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti, two of them Christmas-themed, and surrounded them with instrumental music of Scarlatti and Corelli. If contemplating something small and yet ineffably perfect be counted a mood of Christmas, Magnificat director Warren Stewart’s program went far toward capturing it.

Scarlatti’s Intricate Cantatas

Given their circumscribed forces and design, not to mention their number — one scholar’s study of the sources lists 783 of them — Scarlatti’s cantatas are not only remarkably fine music, but surprisingly ungeneric. There are countless little individual touches that bespeak care and attention. The accompanied recitatives are full of those word-illustrating musical gestures that scholars call “madrigalisms,” and moreover feature some lively and occasionally intricate string writing. In the arias, as well, Scarlatti sometimes seizes on an image in the text and runs with it.

That sort of musical illustration can be as mechanical as any other stylistic convention, and what impressed me most in the three cantatas on Saturday’s program wasn’t so much the stock imagery (shivering violins to depict bitter cold, and so forth) as Scarlatti’s occasional leap right out of bounds. The serenata Hor che di Febo ascosi, for example, is the soliloquy of a lover contemplating the sleeping beloved. It ends with a gentle aria, sung over a pizzicato bass line and intertwining violins and growing more passionate until, suddenly, the instruments disappear and the singer, unaccompanied, announces that she is leaving: “Addio!” End of the piece.

That sort of drama is rare, but Scarlatti’s arias are consistently characterful. The same work earlier has a delightful continuo aria, “Sì, sì, non dormite” (Yes, yes, sleep not), with a nervous ostinato bass. Another standout came in the “Concerto pastorale” O Betlemme altera: “L’autor d’ogni mio bene” (The source of all riches), a meditation on the Christ child scored for violin, viola and continuo, deeply colored and full of little minore twinges. Handel, who knew Scarlatti during his time in Rome, later reused not a few of the older composer’s tunes. In this case, I think he could have gotten away with lifting the aria entirely.

Both in O Betlemme altera and in the program’s other Christmas cantata, the “Cantata pastorale” Non sò qual più m’ingombra, the joy is gentle, child-scaled. There is energy, too — Non sò’s long opening recitative, depicting a winter night mysteriously transformed into spring, is driven by its active, eager violins, while the pastorale-aria ending O Betlemme altera has more than a bit of kick to it. But the keynotes of Scarlatti’s Christmas are humility and simplicity.

These are lovely pieces, both, and ones moreover whose small scale ought to endear them to sopranos looking for Christmas recital fare. That I’d not heard either of them before probably has something to do with the edition situation: Up until a few years ago, only a tiny handful of Scarlatti’s cantatas had ever been published. (The folks at the Scarlatti Project are on the case, and offer editions of all three of the cantatas on Magnificat’s program, among dozens of others. Enterprising singers, take note.)

Magnificat’s performances, deft and genial, in general suited the music well. Webster has an apt vocal timbre for these pieces — clear and pure, rounded rather than shrill, altogether beautiful when, as happened frequently, the music reposed itself. What she didn’t always have Saturday was sufficient interest in carrying the words across. Consonants went occasionally missing, and vowels were sometimes hard to distinguish. Then, too, Webster’s pitch was sometimes marginally off in rapidly moving music.

The intermittent pitch problems extended to the instrumental side, where Stewart on cello and his colleagues in the upper strings once or twice found themselves distinctly at odds. Character-wise, though, the string playing was a constant joy: sweet and gentle, yet articulate, and ornamented with both imagination and sense.

On their own, the players contributed a sonata a quattro of Scarlatti and a sonata and concerto grosso by his contemporary Corelli. Stewart’s program note contains a defense of playing Corelli’s “Christmas” Concerto (Op. 6/8) with only four strings. It’s true that the piece works perfectly well this way — heck, you can go further and omit the viola without making the thing musically ungrammatical — but terraced dynamics are no real substitute for the neat interplay of tutti and solo strings you get with a string orchestra, however small.

The Scarlatti sonata is a different sort of case, since it appears that the concerto-grosso version in which it was first, posthumously published was someone’s (the publisher’s?) beefing-up of the four-part original. (At one time this and its siblings were touted as “the first string quartets,” because they don’t explicitly involve continuo, just the four instruments. Magnificat’s Katherine Heater did provide a discreet, and attractive, keyboard continuo Saturday.)

Corelli, With Ornaments

First violinist Rob Diggins had a solo turn in the first of Corelli’s Op. 5 violin sonatas. As most violinists seem to do these days, he played the ornaments published by Walsh in 1710 and claimed to be the composer’s own. It’s a little odd to see these graces — surely meant only for the interest and guidance of the player, and not intended to be reproduced literally in performance even once, let alone scores of times — becoming, in our time, a de facto part of the text of the piece.

It’s understandable, because the Walsh/”Corelli” embellishments seem infallibly “right” (and insinuate themselves into the brain once you’ve heard them). But I do wish that violinists would occasionally play some of the other surviving contemporaneous graces, or — dare we hope? — invent their own.

That said, Diggins tossed them off stylishly, while in the faster, more gymnastic movements of the sonata, his unusually subdued approach paid unexpected dividends. I don’t think I’ve heard a less demonstratively virtuosic performance of the piece, but the slower tempos and Diggins’ rhythmic flexibility made for much more detail of phrasing and inflection than you usually hear.

Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.