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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
Warren Stewart
February 4, 2007
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Stradella's La Susanna Revivified By Thomas Busse
Like most musicians, I first became acquainted with the music of Alessandro Stradella through a late-19th-century publication, Twenty-four Italian Art Songs and Arias of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Most of the selections receive lush romantic treatments in the accompaniment part, and selections from this book remain the basis of many voice-teaching studios. Even today, students applying to Juilliard's undergraduate voice program must sing one of the selections. (Oddly enough, the editor of the collection even took the liberty of including some of his soupy Romantic compositions under fictitious Italian names.)
The association of Stradella (1644-1682) with music for amateur vocalists still taints his reputation among cognoscenti of opera. Therefore, it was refreshing to see, in the true spirit of counterculture, that a fair-size audience had shown up to an offering of a Stradella oratorio, La Susanna, at St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco, during Sunday's Super Bowl. The players were Magnificat, the small period-instrument ensemble under the direction of founder and cellist Warren Stewart. The performance was what you would expect from Magnificat (which is a compliment), and the enthralled audience took nary a glance at today's ubiquitous electronic devices to check out the latest gridiron scores.
Stradella's 1681 work is a typical Italian oratorio of the period (the most famous example probably being Carissimi's Jephtha). It draws from an apocryphal tale in which two elders accost Susanna, a faithful Hebrew wife, while she is bathing in a secluded garden. Susanna refuses their advances, so the elders (read: dirty old men) accuse her of adultery. Unlike in Gavin Newsom's San Francisco, the punishment is death by stoning. In the end, the Lord sends Daniel in to put things right, and the work concludes with a madrigal containing the theme that the Lord looks favorably on the innocent and punishes false accusers.
The oratorio, scored for two solo violins, continuo, and five soloists, is typical of the genre, featuring a division in two parts where the first sets up the conflict and the second yields a resolution. Stradella's music simultaneously looks toward the future and the past. The older elements include madrigal-type choruses and a narrator. Looking toward the future, many of his arias fall just short of becoming true da capo arias that the following generation of composers favored. The melodies often sound like Handel because they often became Handel.
Magnificat's instrumentalists, in addition to Stewart, were two husband-and-wife teams: Rob Diggins and Jolianne von Einem, and lutenist David Taylor and harpsichordist Hanneke van Proosdij. It is no surprise that this literally united ensemble played with first-rate cohesion and attention to detail. More commendable was the dramatic timing they devised to connect numbers — a difficult feat to achieve in vocal music, without or even with a conductor. Also notable was the instrumentalists' sensitivity to the dramatic topics throughout. Considering that the violin was developed in tandem with music of this style, the idiomatic nature of the part writing must have been a joy for Diggens and von Einem to play. New Jersey soprano Laura Heimes alone was worth the price of a ticket. Her clear, expressive sound often soared beautifully above the ensemble. Her performance of the oratorio's best number, "Da chi spero aita, O Cieli," elicited spontaneous applause from at least one audience member (it could have been a touchdown). Stradella used a lamento bassline for this pivotal dramatic point of the oratorio; to enhance the aria's plaintiveness, the two violinists played it muted. I take issue with the mutes because they inhibit expression and intentional variation of dynamics in a work speaking of "pleas," "trembling," and "cries." Perhaps this choice was made to cover Heimes' tendency toward inaudibility in her lower register. More successful was a lamenting recitative performed shortly after this aria, accompanied solely by theorbo (a relative of the lute), in an exceptionally fine moment of playing by Tayler. The other standouts among the vocalists were recent Bay Area transplant soprano Jennifer Paulino, as Daniel, and New York bass Peter Becker, as the first dirty old man. Paulino's voice is less crystalline than Heimes', but she exhibited fantastic coloratura and a warmer, fuller sound. She also warmed up quickly, appearing as a soloist only in the second part of the oratorio after sitting on the sidelines for an eternity. Paulino launched right away into an arioso, "Dove correte," augmented by a brilliantly executed harpsichord concerto improvised by Proosdij to a lightning-fast, running bass. Bass Peter Becker's voice is just plain beautiful. He exhibits phenomenal evenness, from the top to the bottom of his range.
Less impressive were the Texan male alto Christopher Conley, as the narrator, and the Bloomington tenor Paul Elliott, as the second elder. Although the singers made convincing actors, both exhibited intonation problems. When listening to out-of-town singers performing with local groups, I expect to hear a certain "wow" factor, which these performances lacked. The program notes offered no biographical information about the performers. Nearly every source I have read about Stradella laments his early death at age 43. Although it would be fascinating to hear what he would have done with the newer style in ascendancy at the time of his demise, his surviving corpus includes at least four operas and six oratorios — all of which deserve modern performances by enterprising ensembles such as Magnificat. I hear a rumor that Magnificat aspires to obtain funding to produce a Stradella opera in the next couple of seasons. Let's hope it happens.
(Thomas Busse is the music director of San Francisco's City Concert Opera and a freelance professional singer.)
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