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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
December 21, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
Most of the Bay Area's major early-music ensembles dip a toe into the seventeenth century every so often, but none live there quite as Magnificat does. Warren Stewart's small consort of singers and players has concentrated its attention for many years on that bewilderingly complex musical world. It was no surprise that they would be the ones to dip into Marc-Antoine Charpentier's rich treasury of Advent and Christmas music to construct a Christmas concert. The program (heard Sunday at St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church, San Francisco) was typical of the ensemble: carefully thought out, lovingly if not quite flawlessly performed.
Charpentier spent most of his life locked out of the more prominent musical jobs in France by the favored composer of the French Court, Lully. To one comparing their music now, the preference is hard to understand. But, then, the difference might be as much effect as cause. Lully, the court composer, found himself confined to opera in the rather stiff French classical style. Charpentier, attaching himself to theatrical companies, religious establishments, and private households, had perforce to develop a greater variety of manners.
Though you'd think the manner of the "O Antiphons" would be enough for one composer. These are the antiphons to the Magnificat in the Catholic liturgy of Charpentier's time for the seven days before Christmas; they're called such because each begins with the exclamation "O" — "O sapientia," " O Adonai," "O radix Jesse," and so on. Charpentier's harmony is rich and deep and yearning, full of suspensions and blissfully extended dissonances. When you reach a cadence, it's preceded by glowing seventh and ninth chords and wreathed about with cadential ornaments. And the "O"'s themselves are poignant in their harmonic tension and their longing. Charpentier has a way of introducing two voices in consonance and then bringing in a third beneath them that suddenly makes the whole harmony achingly dissonant, but pregnant of resolution. Stewart compared the effect to the yearning for Christ's coming expressed in the texts; he is right.
 Charpentier's manuscript of the "O"s evidently gives instructions for Noëls — French carols, basically — to precede each; and Magnificat provided them in the composer's own instrumental versions. A few of the tunes still turn up in caroling books, but I fear that Americans are more likely to come across them in Charpentier's own Messe de Minuit de Noël (Midnight Mass for Christmas, based almost entirely on French carols). After an intermission came one of Charpentier's half a dozen or so Christmas cantatas, titled Dialogus inter angelos et pastores Judæ (Dialogue between the angels and the shepherds of Judea). The piece moves easily from recitative to aria to chorus to instrumental ritornello in a way that was common in the seventeenth century but a lot rarer in the next. There are a couple of extended vocal numbers — a fine bass air, "Consolare filia Sion" (Take comfort, O daughter of Zion), and the soprano monologue of an angel, announcing Jesus' birth to the bewildered shepherds. There is a brief — but breathtaking — meditation on the Infant, so helpless and cold and yet full of love. And then, characteristically, an innocently joyful dance-song to end — the soprano (who was the Angel only a few moments before) leading, the others chiming in in call-and-response style. The singers were very fine, as they generally are with Magnificat, and they sang in what (to my ears, anyway) sounded like very accurate French Latin. Daniel Hutchings, the haute-contre (a very high, light tenor) sounded strained occasionally, and was not always spot-on in pitch, but given the difficulty of the parts that was understandable. He was the top voice in a splendid male trio that anchored nearly all the music. The other members were Scott Whitaker, tenor (his usual mellifluous self) and Hugh Davies, bass (resonant and agile and altogether delightful). Best of all was soprano Catherine Webster. She sang in only a couple of the antiphons, and here and there in the Dialogus, but her bright, clear, nimble voice was a wonder to hear.
The instrumental playing was shakier. Doubling single violins with Baroque flutes is practically a recipe for queasy intonation, however good the players; and there was a lot of doubling Sunday afternoon. Then there was the matter of the notes inégales — notes written as all of equal length, but conventionally "swung" in French Baroque music. The question is how much swing; and generally a good-sized Baroque band settles into an easy rhythm of its own pretty quickly. Magnificat's two violins never did quite agree about where there were inégales, or how pointed they were. And the singers had trouble agreeing with either of them. It is a lot easier to play inégales on a stringed instrument than to sing them in coloratura. Loosen up your right wrist and let the bow do "what it wants," and they practically play themselves with a Baroque bow. But to get the same loose-yet-precise irregularity in a vocal melisma must be murder. Magnificat's singers typically fell back on dotted rhythms — a lot more pointed than even the most pointed of the strings. But no one ought to quibble around such wonderful music. Charpentier's easy mix of mirth and solemnity is exactly the right tone for Christmas, and it was with a kind of shock that I realized that we don't really know how to do that any more. I woke up Sunday morning to an NPR interview with Philip Brunelle, who among other things directs a choir called VocalEssence that has inaugurated a competition for new Christmas carols. NPR played excerpts of this year's two winners, which were quite beautiful in a John Rutter-ish sort of way. But they were definitely music to sit and listen to; that final Chorus of Shepherds was music to sing, and if it were fitted out with singable English words you could put it in a carolers' book tomorrow and people would sing it. Short, catchy, with a little rhythmic "hook" at the end that is just unusual enough to be ear-catching but not unusual enough to be really difficult to sing. (I am tempted to send in a submission from "Mark Anthony Carpenter" to next year's VocalEssence competition.) That is music of the season indeed. Thanks to Magnificat for bringing it to us.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
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