Venice “D!!!”

Dantone turns to the audience and, with one hand on his heart takes a very deep bow. He then turns to the orchestra and, with hands held in a beseeching prayerful fashion, bows to them also.

He’s an experienced conductor, especially with early music. I had seen him conduct Handel’s ‘Rinaldo’ in Köln with that wonderful Varduhi Abrahamyan. That had been a great success. But tonight he had made an awful mistake or at least let an awful mistake occur.

Most of a conductor’s hard work is done in rehearsal. If, as sometimes in England rehearsal time is minimal, the conductor will make sure that all the difficult changes of tempo are secure. Sometimes that is ALL a conductor has time to prepare.

But something went terribly wrong at one of these tempo changes in the Bach Suite BWV 1067. What should he do? Well, in every score and orchestral part there are rehearsal letters so Dantone persevered for a few bars then stopped the orchestral for a fraction of a section softly saying “D”. An immediate downbeat and the orchestra was happily on its way with the Bach again. Very professional recovery from something that should never have happened.

This is the first time I have ever seen this happen. They say in the trade, “Your first wrong note is your last wrong note!” but I have never heard an equivalent saying for conductors. We heard a similar sort of thing two weeks ago in ‘La Fenice’ when a tenor entered with the wrong tempo which he tried to enforce on the conductor to no avail. When the tenor entered later, the conductor actually changed his tempo to that of the tenor!! But this time, it was the whole orchestra which went wrong. What is wrong with ‘La Fenice’.

Talking with the lady with whom I was sharing the box (The other two abbonimenti had not turned up), I mentioned this. Her reply was, “They don’t pay conductors very much here”. I suspect that they do not assign enough rehearsal time either, especially for the younger conductors. Perhaps it is pure coincidence that I have only encountered this sort of thing in ‘La Fenice’?

So how did Dantone feel at the end of the concert with all those bows? Well, the audience made it clear that they had enjoyed the performance despite a few seconds of mayhem. So he turned to the orchestra and talked a little then conducted an electric encore of the last movement of the Bach Suite BWV 1069. I hope he felt better after all that!! We certainly did!!

The performance began with a performance of the Introit from Campra’s Requiem Mass. The ‘La Fenice’ opera chorus sounded wonderful and the balance was superb. This is a beautiful piece. I’ve tried to find a decent performance on Youtube but unfortunately I’ve failed.

One of the reasons for the good sound was that the orchestra and chorus was on low staging stretching out into the audience from the opera stage. It wasn’t simply a thrust stage. The staging stretched the full width of the theatre taking out about a third of the stalls. The wood of the staging gave us a lovely contrabassi and ‘celli sound so the balance was ideal. I wish we had heard previous concerts with this orientation but I suppose they need the income from the stalls that are displaced.

The Bach Suites are very popular and Dantone gave good readings of the three performed this evening, BWV 1067 1068 1069. There was some superb flute playing and the trumpets fitted into the ensemble playing well in the theatre acoustic. One wierd featuire of the performance was the spectacle of the flute solist, who had just played so well, walking up the stairs to the stage and walking across the stage out of the theatre in full view of the audience while the orchestra played an extremely quiet movement! What’s wrong with these people? Do they underpay flute players as well?

Dantone came into his own in the W F Bach concerto for keyboard and strings in F minor. He conducted and played the virtuoso keyboard part to good effect and the excellent dynamic control of the orchestra enabled us to hear the quiet sound of the harpsichord . Dantone played the solo part well but really went to town in the incredible cadenzas.

An eventful but enjoyable evening but am I being unfair when I say that I would prefer to hear this programme played by his group I heard in Koln?