Monteverdi couldn’t have been more open about his belief that sacred music should be as pointedly dramatic as opera, the new form he helped create.
A theme of this summer’s Mostly Mozart Festival is spirituality, explored by way of works from across the expanse of musical history. Having presented the most recent of its examples, Osvaldo Golijov’s “Pasión Según San Marcos” (2000), over the weekend, the festival offered the earliest, Monteverdi’s “Vespro Della Beata Vergine” (1610), at the Rose Theater on Monday evening.
The performers were an exotic assembly: Coro Della Radio Svizzera, Lugano — a choir from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland — supported by I Barocchisti, a Swiss period string ensemble, and Les Sacqueboutiers, a French period brass group. All but the brass players were making their United States debuts, as was theconductor, Diego Fasolis.
Monteverdi couldn’t have been more open about his belief that sacred music should be as pointedly dramatic as opera, the new form he helped create. The first music you hear in the Vespers began life as the ebullient toccata that raises the curtain on “Orfeo,” Monteverdi’s first opera, composed in 1607, although in this version a choral setting, Domine Ad Adiuvandum (“O God, Make Haste to Help Me”), is woven through the rising and falling brass figures. It appears not to have troubled Monteverdi, or anyone else, that the music in which he was celebrating the Virgin originally introduced an opera peopled with pagan gods.
Mr. Fasolis’s performance, in the modern, dry-sounding Rose Theater, showed the work, with all its history and texture, in an odd light. Absent the reverberant bloom of church acoustics, the music’s roots in opera and madrigal seemed especially clear.
Did it do violence to the Vespers as such? Probably. It’s possible that Monteverdi imagined this music performed in a small, dry chapel. (The score’s most famous use, as Monteverdi’s application for the position of maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, didn’t happen until 1613.) But his rich orchestration and his use of the “Orfeo” toccata suggest that an ambient space was part of his compositional calculation.
So was the use of space: much of this music is richly antiphonal and is best heard when groups of singers and players are set apart. On Monday, effective use of distance was the exception.
These would be quibbles if the performance had fully drawn on this score’s vigor and expressive power. To watch Mr. Fasolis’s calisthenic conducting, you’d have thought it would. But the singing and playing rarely reflected that expansiveness and energy.
The performance did have its moments. Some of the solo singing — most notably by Laura Antonaz and Roberta Invernizzi, sopranos, and Marco Beasley and Sandro Naglia, tenors — addressed Monteverdi’s florid writing with both agility and emotional heft. And both the choir and the instrumentalists produced a fine, homogenous sound in parts of the Magnificat and in Nisi Dominus.
But a listener had to wrest those nuggets from amid odd balances, skirmishes with intonation, ensemble slackness and tempos that proved unusually inert in these dry acoustics. If you love this work, you may have found yourself searching for fresh insights even in spite of the interpretive problems, but in the end you had to take this performance for what it was: a spectacular work in a performance that went off the rails.
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