Monteverdi Vespers by Choral Arts and Piffaro (2nd review)

All is not lost when, on a cold Sunday afternoon, music lovers pack a 19th-Century Philadelphia church to hear a 400-year-old choral work. Claudio Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine, composed in 1610, stands as firmly behind the Western choral tradition as his Orfeo does behind its operatic one.

Both were composed while Monteverdi was still in his 20s. For sheer groundbreaking originality, it's as if a single composer had produced both Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring. With all due regard for Dufay, Palestrina et al., the genuine art music tradition begins with Monteverdi.

No genius works in a vacuum. Monteverdi was only able to give full rein to his invention in the free-spirited atmosphere of Venice, where he employed the then-new form of the madrigal to exploit the independence of instrumental and vocal parts. Individual voices, breaking free of monody and polyphony much as the individual speakers of Greek tragedy had broken from Dionysian ritual, formed the basis of musical modernism. The independence of voices in, say, an Elliott Carter string quartet, is a direct descendant.

"'Black but beautiful daughter'

Notionally, the Vespers is a hymn to the Virgin, but most of its musical and textual material comes from the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, with antiphonal responses based on the Marian legend. The juxtaposition of "the black but beautiful daughter of Jerusalem" who rises from her love-couch with the tidings of the Annunciation is striking, to say the least, although both have a common source in fertility ritual.

Bach's B minor Mass is in similar respects a collage, and in both works unity emerges from disparate elements. The Bach is heard in many places every year; the Monteverdi is a rarity, even in its quadricentennial year. It shouldn't be so.

Choral Arts Philadelphia— formerly the Choral Arts Society, by which name it's probably still better known— battled the weather in more ways than one, as heating problems at its original venue forced it to relocate at the last minute. The group gave the Vespers a fine and richly satisfying performance in collaboration with Piffaro, the Renaissance band, jointly directed by Matt Glandorf.

No two alike

As with the performance of any major Monteverdi work, it was as much a scholarly as an artistic enterprise, since the scoring and arrangement of its sections is at least in part conjectural. This means that no two performances of the score will be quite alike.

Piffaro's instruments aren't all strictly period ones, and one of the most exquisite moments of the performance was a duet between two very modern violins. We can't expect a perfect reconstruction of what 17th-Century Venetians would have heard, any more than we can recreate a Shakespeare performance that replicates what 17th-Century Londoners saw. This listener did as he was invited to and enjoyed a full-throated, full-hearted performance of a great and piercingly beautiful work.

Glandorf's chorus, packed into the cramped space of the First Baptist Church, executed nimble, balletic steps in rearranging its forces between numbers. The singing was all deeply committed, with the tenor soloists particularly fine. In all, the occasion was a triumph for the Choral Arts group, for Monteverdi, and even for Philadelphia, which could certainly use a win these days.♦


To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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