San Francisco Classical Voice

That "Salve Regina" begins with an old trope, or gloss, on the ancient hymn that uses a then-popular device: One voice sings the text of the trope, and another answers in echo, so that you hear the last word or part of it as an answer to the main singer's words:

Audi coelum verba mea, plena desiderio et perfusa gaudio.
[Echo:] . . . audio.

(Hear, O Heaven, my word, full of desire and suffused with joy.
[Echo:] . . . I hear.)

Their other duets were on more equal terms, and when they started duelling coloratura, as in "O come sei gentile" (How sweet you are), sparks flew. In the celebrated ciaccona, "Zefiro torna" (Zephyr returns), the passagework was even more dazzling. The piece (like the Salve Regina, by the way) is ordinarily sung by tenors, but I've never heard any tenor duo get around the coloratura explosion of the very end as nimbly as that. And yet the simple quietude and blend Webster and Ellis achieved in "Pulchra es" (You are beautiful), from the 1610 Vespro, was, in its way, as impressive.

As for the wonderful "Confitebor tibi" from the Missa, et Salmi, with its extraordinary ending, the two violins and the two sopranos chasing one another ever more slowly up into the air on the final "Amen" — well, the performance was worthy of the piece, which is saying something. (Some of the pieces in that collection are enough to make you weep; this is stuff that was just sitting around in the San Marco archives for years after the composer's death, until some enterprising person threw a pile of it together and published it. Who knows what else there might have been in a different heap somewhere, now lost?)

Each singer got a solo on the second half. It was Ellis who had the celebrated "Lamento d'Arianna," and it was perhaps not the best choice for her. She sang it confidently and even vehemently enough, with moments of true pathos, but there were stretches that were too much singing and not enough acting, too little lived.

I even fleetingly wondered why she and not Webster (who has the marginally richer voice and the more expressive Italian) got Arianna; but that was before Webster sang "Si dolce è'l tormento" (So sweet is the torment). This is a little (so you would think) trifle from an anthology, just a tiny strophic song, made of the simplest materials imaginable — moving note to note almost always by step, almost all the notes of equal length, simpler than the simplest folksong, and with one of those "I will be faithful to the cruel woman I love unto death, and then she will finally repent" texts that are the stuff of folksong (and also of madrigals).

Simple, yes; and therefore frighteningly easy to kill stone dead, as has happened almost every time I've heard it. Not this time. Webster didn't fall into the trap of ornamenting the line into rags. She embellished, yes, but gently, and more often by redirecting the line entirely than by breaking it up into smaller note-values. And she wrapped herself up in the words and made them carry every phrase, subtly delaying a consonant or hurrying one, and pouring grief into every syllable. David Tayler, accompanying on theorbo, played the continuo part in broken chords in a way I haven't heard done before, oddly affecting, not the usual one-to-a-bar formal strum, but something like a delicate pre-echo of what the stereotypical disconsolate lover of a couple centuries hence would have plucked out on a guitar. It was a breathtaking performance.

Breaking up the vocal pieces were two Marini trio sonatas (including the familiar Variations on "La Monica") and a Castello solo sonata, played with dash, vigor, and (in the Marini) uncommonly sassy by-play by Diggins and Freivogel. Diggins' impetuous Castello was particularly fine. The program ended with its two upbeat Monteverdi's Greatest Hits: first "Zefiro" (sounding a little odd with the voices an octave up and no bowed continuo instrument on the ground bass, only guitar and harpsichord), and then the canzonetta "Chiome d'oro" (Golden hair), rather slower than usual, ambling rather than striding briskly, possibly so the violins could get in their large and various repertoire of embellishments. No matter; if "Chiome d'oro" was a little underwhelming as a concert-ender, there was the frisky encore, from the 1607 Scherzi, "Damigella tutta bella." The second line instructs the "lovely maiden" of the title to pour some more wine — was this perhaps an allusion to the reception immediately afterwards?