Russian music for most of us tends to be romantic, often orchestral, always rich; or else, as sung by Cappella Romana, chant sung in distinctive style, often monophonic, serious church music. Last Friday night’s concert at St. Mark’s Cathedral was a complete change from what we have come to expect from this group.
Credit Queen Catherine the Great, who imported Venetian opera composers to her court. Some composed music for the Orthodox church as well as court music, and two of these, Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785) and Giuseppe Sarti (1729-1802), not only spent years in St. Petersburg, but trained Russian composers in their style as well. These two Venetians, plus their students Stepan Anikiyevich Degtiarev, Maxim Sozontovich Berezovsky, Artemy Lukyanovich Vedel, and Dmitri Stepanovich Bortnyansky, composed the music for this concert, all of it for written for church services.
Baroque in style, cheerful, upbeat music in beautiful polyphony filled the cathedral. Thirteen singers plus conductor/tenor Alexander Lingas brought their trademark purity of sound, no vibrato, to the performance. It took a few moments at the start to get the balance right, but there was very little time when one could not hear the inner vocal lines clearly, mostly in four to six parts altogether. The bass line was very much an anchoring force, the four men always prominent though never feeling too heavy.
The Venetians and their students did not bring operatic drama to this sacred music. These pieces were rhythmically steady, usually in a beat of four, and only rarely a run, a group of eighth notes, a dotted rhythm or a word emphasized in a melismatic phrase, yet they were anything but dull. The second half of the concert had more variety by the addition of chant with solos and responses, but melodic with all the voices.
As always, Cappella Romana provided a scholarly description of the music, plus all the words in three columns: Church Slavonic in Cyrillic, the same text phonetically in our alphabet, and next to it, the translation to English. This adds to the experience, making it possible to follow along, know where one is in the program and the meaning of what is being sung.
It was originally performed at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in the Netherlands last year, one of two the group was asked to perform with the theme of “La Serenissima: Venice.” Cappella Romana will perform the second one here at the end of next year’s concert series and if it is anything like this first one, something not to miss for the sheer beauty of it.
