Gian Carlo Menotti would have been 100 on July 7th and The Esoterics, joined by the Cornish College Choral Scholars, has honored him with a pair of concerts devoted to his music (last performance tonight, July 9, at 8 p.m. at All Pilgrims Christian Church on Broadway).
A composer and librettist who marched to his own drummer, he’s best known for his Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, but anyone who has seen any of his other chamber operas doesn’t forget them. Some are tragic, like The Medium; amusing, like the curtain-raiser The Telephone; and others chilling and all too true to life, as in The Consul, where a woman trying to get a visa to leave a police state gets trapped in a maze of contradictory delays.
Menotti, who also began the Spoleto Festivals in Charleston, S.C., and in Spoleto, Italy, always had a special feeling for the human voice. The works which Esoterics director Eric Banks chose for the concert Friday night included his fable The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore or The Three Sundays of a Poet, as well as Moans, Groans, Cries and Sighs or A Composer at Work and finally, in a completely different vein, his Regina Coeli.
Unicorn is modeled on madrigal comedies of the late Renaissance, but there is a large streak of cynicism running through it, and an undercurrent of morality which doesn’t really emerge until the end. Composed in six parts in singspiel style, it’s tonal but not hummable except in snatches, and there are wonderful effects like that of gossiping townfolk. The music is not easy, but The Esoterics under Banks has a well deserved reputation for singing the most difficult music a cappella without ever going off pitch an iota, and they achieved this evening’s music without any damage to that.
The words, which Menotti wrote himself, are paramount and The Esoterics had the forethought to project them in supertitles on the back wall but, as is rarely the case with any choral work, the singers’ word were so clear there was barely any need for it. The acoustics at the small Pilgrim Church on Broadway may have helped.
Unicorn comprises an introduction, twelve madrigals, some accompanied, some not, and six instrumental interludes. These last were played by Melissa Achten on the harp, and Matt Reed playing alto saxophone, clarinet, or flute. The two had reduced the score for nine instruments to the four they used. It was well done, the music never sounded thin. The original score calls for ten dancers who weren’t included here, but artist Sara Hogenson created three attractive banners of the three mythical animals which graced the performing space.
The very funny Moans, Groans is the stream of thought of a composer at work on deadline with all the attendant frustrations: the wish for an interruption one moment, the fury at being interrupted the next, whether by person or irritating fly. While it’s his own process, any creative person will recognize it.
Lastly, the chorus performed Regina Coeli, the moving song of priase to the Virgin which Menotti wrote for the unveiling of the restored 15th-century Filippo Lippi frescoes in the Duomo in Spoleto. This was made more special by one of the chorus, who came forward to describe that she had been in the choir that day, and that, true to form, Menotti had come up with the final pages of the score as the choir prepared to go out into the Duomo to sing it. Like the chorus Friday night, they achieved it superbly.
