I'm not sure what it says about the Berkeley Early Music Festival that you can find a performance of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespro della beata Vergine not actually on the Festival program, but among the associated “fringe” events. A “fringe” so grand as that suggests a Festival proper on an impossibly imposing scale, which this one — despite the American premiere of a, well, “impossibly imposing” Renaissance masterpiece (see this article for particulars) — is not.
On the other hand, as the forces involved in that premiere might suggest, the reason the Berkeley Festival looks to a Bay Area early music aficionado merely like a mild upward blip in early music activity every other year is that the ambient level around here is so high. Small wonder that the “fringe” occasionally threatens to dwarf the woven part of the carpet.
Artists' Vocal Ensemble
Photo by H. Tran
So what would in most other places have been a main event, featuring mostly imported personnel, was at the Festival a side-production by a local ensemble. And not one of the Bay Area's larger, more institutionalized early Music groups, either, but the Artists' Vocal Ensemble (AVE), a small professional choir only four years old. In collaboration with The Whole Noyse (the Bay Area's go-to Monteverdi Vespers band for at least 20 years — and of how many other locales could you even make such a statement of an ensemble without its being absolute gibberish?), AVE and its music director, keyboardist Jonathan Dimmock, gave a performance of Monteverdi's enduringly amazing collection at Berkeley's St. Mark's Episcopal Church that would have rated advance headlines just about anywhere else.
Every so often in music history you come across a work that was obviously meant as a too-blatant-to-be-missed demonstration of the composer's skill. The 1610 Vespers is maybe the most astonishing of them all. Dimmock's program note describes the piece as a sort of job application to the Pope, which is true enough. But what could Paul V — could anyone? — have made of the thing?
It's all in there: fantastic, not to say excessive, mastery of counterpoint; a confident, not to say cocky, delight in wordplay; ostentatious up-to-date-ness in everything from the vocal styles required to the extravagant instrumental forces demanded — coupled with that most over-the-top nod to tradition, Monteverdi's basing the whole thing (motets apart) on chant
canti fermi. Under each of the massive choral settings of the Vespers Psalms runs the bare traditional recitation formula for a psalm. Around the little formula for the litany “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis” (Blessed Mary, pray for us), Monteverdi weaves a vast, complex instrumental canzona.
With 15 singers, AVE is certainly large enough to cover all the parts — the largest number of independent lines in the work is 10, in the Nisi Dominus. And the florid and intricate writing, even in the big Psalm settings, makes its own eloquent case for one- (or at most two-) on-a-part performance. That said, it remains a tall order for any ensemble.
Uncommon Skill
The AVE singers threw themselves eagerly into the task, and the results were a tribute to their skill and their enthusiasm alike. Intonation and balance were remarkably good, with no obvious weak spots in the texture. (If the tenor line seemed strikingly strong and clear on occasion, it wasn't that the other parts were lacking; it's just that AVE's four tenors pack an unusually formidable punch.)
There were signs, to be sure, of hasty preparation. With strong but few singers spread across many parts, unsurprisingly the most obvious errors were wrong entrances. Keeping your eye on the score and the beat in such convoluted stuff takes an unholy level of sustained concentration.
Dimmock didn't make matters easy on his sopranos, either, by having them face the icon of the Blessed Virgin on the rear wall of the church for the “Sonata sopra 'Sancta Maria.'” It was a lovely conceit, but a major logistical risk, because in this mother of all rest-counting nightmares, the singers all had their backs to the conductor. Tonia d'Amelio, glancing over her shoulder and bobbing at the knees, did her best to convey the beat to the other three sopranos, but even so there were some false steps.
Quite apart from these occasional glitches, though, there were problems of pacing and phrasing in the big choruses. The work is so full of detail — all of it interesting, all enticing the individual singer to dwell on it lovingly — that keeping larger-scale goals in sight is one hell of a job. One of those unfulfilling, irritating jobs, too, in which your primary role is to cut off other people's effusions in the name of economy, or something almost equally unromantic.
AVE didn't exactly dawdle over the music; indeed, the basic tempos were briskish, sometimes almost excessively so (I'm thinking here of the opening of the “Ave maris stella”). But once a movement was in swing, it tended to lose direction. The shaping seemed to be primarily on the local level, so that long stretches of music had no trajectory of their own, and the effect was one of lost forward momentum even if the actual tempo didn't bog down that much.
Also, phrases often reached their dynamic peak at the resolution of the cadence, rather than just before. Some of that I'm inclined to attribute to the way well-tuned triads, like AVE's, resonate; even so, there was a weird sense of tensing, rather than relaxing, into cadences.
Line Emerges Into the Light
In smaller, self-contained sections, it must be said, AVE's singers demonstrated phenomenal control and shaping of phrases. For me the highlight of the entire performance was the “Et misericordia” of the Magnificat, a dialogue between three lower and three upper voices that was, here, an extraordinary emergence of line out of the gritty depths and into the light.
(The scholarly consensus these days is that two movements of the Vespers, including the Magnificat, were meant to be performed at much lower than written pitch. The transposition takes the glittery edge off the high instrumental parts in the Magnificat, but it also makes the vocal lines more reasonable — except in this one spot, where the low voices really are crawling around in the sepulchral dark. In AVE's performance, the guttural depths sounded extreme, but also right; for the first time, I'd found something in the low-pitch version that actually compensated for the loss of the marvelous, if spurious, high violin and cornetto parts.)
The solo singing varied from good to exceptional. Soprano Tonia d'Amelio was a standout, tempering her earthy edge to Rita Lilly's more delicate voice in the two-soprano “Pulchra es,” and singing in eerily perfect thirds with alto Clifton Massey in the Magnificat's “Esurientes.” Fred Jodry was the sonorous bass soloist in the Magnificat's “Quia respexit,” and I think was responsible as well for the clarionlike invocation “Deus in adjutorium” at the opening of the work.
Among the tenors, Neal Rogers' rather lumpy “Nigra sum” was disappointing, but Monteverdi's bravura three-tenor riff on the Trinity, “Duo seraphim,” was magnificent, with Ed Betts and Jeff Barnett joining Rogers in the daunting vocal roulades. Barnett, who had the main part in the great tenor/echo dialogue of “Audi coelum,” covered the part's ridiculously wide range with only slight signs of strain; Betts (the delicate “echo” in “Audi coelum”) came into his own in the Magnificat's “Gloria Patri,” where Rogers was his echo.
The few stretches of plainchant were beautifully and simply sung, men taking one antiphon and women the next one. I am not sure how Dimmock picked the antiphons. It can't have been purely by matching mode and final to the music to come, because there were some jarring transitions, particularly the one from the chant “In odorem” to the psalm “Laetatus sum.”
On the instrumental side, things were in the capable hands of Whole Noyse's omnicompetent winds (playing cornetti and trombones most of the time, though in the Magnificat they switched nimbly to recorders) and a few string players well known to Bay Area audiences. (Herb Myers, who played recorder, flute, and curtal — sort of an early bassoon — with the other Whole Noyse folks, doubled on viola with the string band.) With the wind forces on one side of the space and the strings on the other, coordination was sometimes a problem, especially when one or more widely spaced singers had to be factored into the mix.
Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.
