San Francisco Classical Voice

Much of the impetus for the establishment of the Berkeley Festival came from UC/Berkeley's Department of Music. It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that this year's week-long festival began on Sunday with a grand collaboration between the department and the festival's guests in the department's own Hertz Hall on the UC campus. On the departmental side were four current faculty -- Marika Kuzma, Kate Van Orden, Christy Dana, and Anthony Martin -- as well as the organist and musicologist John Butt, on the faculty until a few years ago. They came together with two department-sponsored student ensembles (the Collegium Musicum and the Chamber Chorus), a number of friends from the Bay Area's vibrant early-music scene, and the members of The King's Noyse (the crack Renaissance instrumental band, in town for the festival) to present a grand program, titled "Venice 1600," meant to recreate a festal Mass at the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.

Given that this was the opening concert of a major international festival, it was a little surprising to see the scholarly end of things treated so casually. "Venice 1600" is an odd title for a program much of whose music not only was written decades later, but sounds it (rather as though a program centered on one of Bach's chorale cantatas were titled "Leipzig 1700"!). And some of the pieces chosen look awfully odd in the context of an early 17th century Catholic Mass.

Venetian musicians were renowned, not to say notorious, for embellishing their liturgy with music of a distinctly secular cast. But I wonder whether even they would have gone so far as to use a famous madrigal (Rore's "Ancor che col partire" -- played on instruments, but still) as the processional introducing a high Mass. And a vernacular devotional piece like Frescobaldi's "Maddalena alla croce" would have had no place in a Latin liturgy, either, for this was music meant for more private use.

But heck, why quibble, especially when the pieces that didn't really "belong" on the program were among its highlights? The Rore was there, presumably, to show off King's Noyse leader David Douglass' unearthly facility in division-playing (that is, improvising around a melodic line or over a given bass line) He obliged with a torrent of invention (and of notes) such as to leave us breathless. Ellen Hargis' singing of the Frescobaldi was breathtaking in a different sense -- still and contained but suggesting somehow a composure attained painfully through grief. Knowing Hargis only through her recordings, I had thought of her as a fine "light" early-music singer, with a clear and flexible voice and a charming way of inflecting lighter music. I had not heard her dig so deeply into anything before. The surprise was part of the delight.

The meat of the program, the five standard texts of the Mass, was mostly Monteverdi. Monteverdi's Mass music is pretty sparse. From his years in Venice there's a splendid, festive Gloria, a few bits of the Credo text, and two complete mass settings -- but in the austere, evenly flowing contrapuntal style that came to be called stile antico ("old style"), rather than the "new" style he used for most of his other music. Marika Kuzma and her choir went for the big Gloria, taking the rest of the Mass from one or the other of the two stile antico settings (except for the Sanctus, a radiant piece in 12 parts by Giovanni Gabrieli).

The result was the kind of stylistic hodgepodge that must have been commonplace in the early 17th century -- placidly contrapuntal one moment, virtuosic and theatrical the next. In one place, indeed, the disjunctions were a little too much for me. The Credo tidbits I mentioned earlier were published in a huge Monteverdi print containing, among other things, one of the two stile antico Masses. Kuzma plugged them into the Credo she took from this Mass.

The Credo began, then, in "old-style" a cappella counterpoint, suddenly changed in style (and acquired instrumental accompaniment) at the "Crucifixus," and then went right back to the austere counterpoint at "Et in Spiritum Sanctum." The print does explicitly suggest doing this, true, but it doesn't really work. And it didn't help that the little Credo movements, pretty obviously meant for solo voices, were sung by the whole choir.

Elsewhere, though, the choir was a marvel -- sonorous, well balanced, disciplined, attentive to words and to phrasing, and well blended even when they had to split into what must have been uncomfortably small groups, as in that 12-part Gabrieli Sanctus. Kuzma conducted them, except in the Gloria, where she was replaced by John Butt (himself a former conductor of the UCB Chamber Chorus). I could not see the female solo singers from where I was sitting, and so it was only afterward that I discovered that Kuzma was not conducting because she was singing the second soprano solo -- very ably, I might add, tracking Hargis nimbly in their many passages together in thirds. The male soloists, drawn from the choir, were nearly a match for the women, which is saying something. I would like very much to identify them, but they were, incredibly, not identified in the program.

As for the instrumental music that surrounded and set off the Mass movements, this was a collaborative effort, some pieces taken by students in the UCB Collegium Musicum, some by local professional players, some by the members of The King's Noyse, and a gratifying number by all three.

The professional playing was often magnificent. I'm thinking especially of the Castello sonata played by four King's Noyse strings, with John Butt at the harpsichord. But more marvelous, to my mind, was what Anthony Martin has done with the players of the Collegium, who are now a pretty impressive Renaissance fiddle band, sporting the appropriate bows, holding their instruments (in the approved manner) halfway down their chests, and playing with energy, spirit, and commendable accuracy. Students and professional musicians are often thrown together in "collaborations" that are little more than publicity stunts. Here, however, there seemed to be no condescension and (more importantly) no reason for any.

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

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved