Venice Three Theorbos for ‘Dido’

My weekend kicks off with a performance at La Fenice of Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’. It’s weird that my first opera here in Venice is by Purcell in English. And I will soon be seeing ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Benjamin Britten. Even Britten’s ‘Little Sweep’ is being produced in Venice.

First on the La Fenice programme, we hear Bruno Maderna’s musique concrete piece ‘Le Rire’; a relic of days gone by when we didn’t have computers or even sythesizers to make electronic music. It is performed with ‘dance’ by a Japanese choreographer from Compagnia KARAS of Tokyo. It consists of dancers running to and fro waving their arms furiously around most inelegantly, I feel. But then, I suppose, the music is not very ‘elegant’, so my criticism is probably inappropriate?

But it is a relief to get to the second half of the programme where we even have some furious hand-waving accompanying the opera there also! (Is this a growing trend in Venetian opera? At least in the Prague Estates Theatre, we had dance more fitting to the music) I am delighted to see three theorbos in the orchestra. As theorbo players normally double guitar, at various points in the piece we have two theorbos and one guitar then sometimes one theorbo and two guitars. We even have a few sections played only by theorbos and guitar! The beginning is the usual shock of strings playing without vibrato but the overall orchestral effect is excellent. Attilio Cremonesi does a good job conducting the band (without a score, I notice) and the ‘echo’ sections are strangely effective as the audience strains its ears to hear an extremely faint ‘echo’.

The entire cast is dressed in black with the exception of Aeneas, who wears a sort of modern hunting jacket. The ‘waving arms’ dancers comment visually on the action throughout and especially in the orchestral sections. Dido does well except for that final “When I am laid …” aria where she hoots a not-very high note and has a little difficulty singing sotto voce sections which the conductor seems to be demanding. But this final aria is still a great success. After all, it is one of the greatest tunes ever written. I’ve appended some youtube URLs of ‘Dido and Aeneas’ at the end of this entry.

As is my habit, I had booked a second row seat in a box which, in La Fenice, costs one third of the price of the first row. Of course I cannot see anything unless I stand up and peer round the corner of the box. But, doing this, I have a better view than the front row whose sightlines are completely destroyed by people in the boxes nearer the stage leaning over. And of course they are doing this because of people between them and the stage leaning out. The traditional opera house is designed so that people in the boxes can see each other more easily than the stage.

La Fenice, originally a baroque theatre, has been rebuilt twice; the most recent being a reconstruction of the 1832 rebuilding after a fire in 1996. The Venetians chose to do a complete reconstruction of the original 1832 theatre. They even retained the ‘horseshoe’ shape going inwards towards the proscenium. This guarantees that a large propertion of the audince will have difficulty viewing the whole stage. I remember thinking how refreshing it was to watch that Luigi Nono opera in the modern Leipzig Opera House. And Luigi Nono was a Venetian! But Munich also rebuilt their house exactly as it had been before with the same inevitable problem with sightlines to the stage. We might have hoped that the city which hosts the Biennale might have come up with a modern design for a twenty first century opera house.

After the opera which, being Saturday was held at an earlier time than usual, I wander into St Mark’s and enjoy listening to the evening celebrant, the Cantor, singing the service in his impecable plainsong style. These old plainsong melodies can be very beatiful. Some of them have been metrecized but I feel they still have a greater integrity in their original form.
Latin, Spanish and English in St Mark’s

The following day I arrive at St Mark’s a little earlier than the week before so I manage to get a seat nearer the front. Imagine my surprise when the music this week is not Venetian!! At least I think so. One piece did sound a little like Victoria but I do not know the music of this period well enough to be sure of that. In Vienna I heard masses that I knew nothing about and had certainly never heard before. Here I am hearing sixteenth and seventeenth century music that I am equally ignorant of.

Like Florence, the High Mass is celebrated in Latin. I remember the Roman church in England tracking down poor priests holding secret Latin masses. I don’t know what happened to them but habits die hard, I presume. But here and in the Florence Duomo, the tradition of the Latin High Mass has not died at all! But St Mark’s helps us out by providing Latin cribs for the ‘Pater Noster’ and the ‘Credo’ which in St Mark’s is chanted by the celebrant and the congregation. This morning the celebrant is getting on in years and loses almost a tone in pitch each time he chants a section. Then, with a jolt of upward feeling, the choir responds. After a while the Cantor comes to the front and takes over with his strong voice and insistent conducting style. The letture are in Italian as usual but I am rather surprised to hear the Vangelo in Spanish! But all is well when it is reread in Italian. They even do a little English as well.

I have heard that there is to be a performance of Monteverdi’s ‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’ in the afternoon. I am particularly interested in hearing this in St Mark’s for historical reasons and also because I simply love the piece.

The Vespro della Beata Vergine di Claudio Monteverdi, or the Monteverdi Vespers as we normally refer to the work, is one of the best known compositions of the Venetian period around the beginnig of the seventeenth cetury.

I can remember the first time I seriously listened to this. A couple of us had travelled down with Will Mathias to hear the premiere of one of his oratotios. He stayed in a hotel while we kipped on the floor of the Cathedral Orgnist’s lounge. That evening, Roy, the organist produced a disc and said, “Listen to this”. He then played us the Kings recording of the Vespers. In the end, we spent the whole evening just listenig to that recording. (But we went to Will’s premiere the evening after!!).

Some years later, after having bought a copy of the Kings version for myself, I came across another recording by the socalled Monteverdi Choir conducted by John Elliot Gardiner, the chap who I saw conducting the Czech Philharmonic in Prague.

This recording changed my whole perception of the piece. It was SO exciting!!! Judging by the way the choir sang in St Marks this week, I’m not sure if Monteverdi ever managed to perform it in this manner. John Elliot Gardiner, and the people who were influenced by him, exposed areas of the music which changed my whole view of that period of music. Too often have I heard lifeless instrumental versions of this Venetian music. They had almost put me off the period altogether; certainly as a living vital time in musical history. So nowadays I see through any lacklustre renderings of these works to the vital lifeforce which produced them many years ago. But I confess to still avoiding those brass renderings of the vocal parts of Venetian music!

But I am stopped in my tracks by a St Mark’s guardian who says, “Private Performance! You need an invitation!”. Another two people appear and receive the same answer to their attempt to enter. But we are not put off. We hang around, perhaps hoping to creep in when they aren’t looking.

I’ve been this route before. Every week in Florence, I turned up for a concert in a private series. I never made the invitation list but, as soon as the people at the entrance saw me each week, the chief honcho would point at me and tell everybody on the door, “Let him in!” I even manged to get into a Ton Koopman concert before some of the invitation holders. So no official at the door of this concert is going to deter me from at least trying to enter St Mark’s.

Amazingly an incredibly important big cheese appears and tells us, “It lasts one and a half hours!” probably thinking that will frighten us away. But this only makes the three of us more insistent that he let us in.

Convinced of our determination the big cheese says “Follow me!”, and he leads us all the way to seats in the centre of the West section of the nave explaining that he and a friend have paid for this performance. They have all travelled from Munich to celebrate the fact that exactly four hundred years ago the Monteverdi Vespers were published. We prostrate ourselves in thankfulness before him and he leaves us convinced that we are suitably appreciative of his gesture.

But there is a tiny audience! This really is VERY private! The group is named the ‘Europa Antiqua Consort’ and boasts a very nice cornetto player. Just as I admire natural trumpet players, I am overawed by a musican who can derive such a nice sound from a lump of hollow wood with a few holes drilled in it! The choir sounds well and has a few decent voices quite adequate to give excellent renderings of the solo parts.

They have set up the performance area in the middle of the crossings, literally as it happens because St Mark’s has the old cross design unlike English cathedrals which have a longer nave or West end. This has problems as the shape of the building leads to a somewhat confused acoustic. This is emphasized when a distant trumpet player answers the orchestral players and sounds clearer because he is playing near the area where musicians used to perform in Monteverdi’s day.

I am appending a couple of videos of the Monteverdi Vespers. The first is interesting as it was filmed in St Mark’s in the same area as we hear this performance on Sunday afternoon. I should point out that it is not the same recording which amazed me years ago, although it is conducted by John Elliot Gardiner (now ‘Sir John’).

Dido and Aeneas videos
Henry Purcell – Dido and Aeneas (Dido’s lament)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOSNacCcj6c

Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, Z. 626 / Richard Hickox & Collegium Musicum 90
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3GBe0lIHiI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IYAw7g6i80
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy9ZwS_Ikso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EAKSzP1_UE
6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F83dMfaYN_Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD-vU0Bi224
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySniYNxoj-A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJOb8y5aW8w

Purcell: Dido and Aeneas / Ricercar Consort
http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk0ds-4z-jo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QB3-RjIn0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNhbk0ntsls&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCnR_-aI6i0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejSIqcab13c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlPIGBsaWic&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXPgWu4-lj4&feature=related

Keith of Ninewells