It’s a heaven-sent chance to hear an extraordinary voice live whenever Reginald Mobley is singing at a Seattle concert. Sunday he was here to sing music he considers his métier, the baroque era: this time, Handel cantatas.
The occasion at Nordstrom Recital Hall was one of the Byron Schenkman and Friends series. The program comprised not only two Handel cantatas but keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti, a rarely heard cantata by Antonia Caldara, and two sonatas which included baroque flute as well. One of them was by Anna Bon, a rare recognized woman composer a generation older than the others. It was a rich, well designed, varied program, only the Scarlatti being works fairly often heard and all of it sheer pleasure.
Besides countertenor Mobley, the performers were Schenkman on harpsichord, Joshua Romatowski playing flute, and Nathan Whittaker on baroque cello.
The two Handel cantatas, “Vedendo Amor” (“Love, seeing that he had cast his net…”) and “Mi palpita il cor” (“My heart trembles”) as well as the Caldara, “Soffri, mio caro Alcino” (“Suffer, dear Alcino”) had typical libretti of the day, all to do with the pursuit of love or the result of being hit by the arrows of love and the usually unrequited results. To us, these words may seem over the top, but they were the style of the day, largely taken from Greek myth and provided the singer with the opportunity to perform with a myriad emotions from bliss to rage.
Mobley’s voice not only sounds effortless and even in its clear and beautiful quality from top to bottom of his wide range, his expressive singing is imbued with unobtrusive understanding of this genre. He made the recitatives descriptive, plaintive, furious, pleading as the words of each indicated.
Joshua Romatowski, flute (Photo courtesy artist)
As each aria ended by returning to the beginning for a repeat section, he embroidered the notes with ornamentation appropriate to the era, often florid and some of which is not used much by modern voices and needs to be very specifically learned and internalized for it to sound natural in the context. When he sang one of those repeats again as an encore, he used yet different ornaments.
Romatowski is a young flutist making his name now on this instrument, and he opened the program in a very early Handel Sonata in G Major, Op.1, No. 5 with harpsichord and cello continuo. The continuo for this is almost a duet with the flute, and though Schenkman kept the harpsichord fairly subdued, Whittaker’s cello matched the flute’s bright sound in the music’s busy score.
However, in other works, particularly those with Mobley, the cello often sounded a bit too loud. Whittaker’s instrument is a sonorous one and though much of the time he seemed to be playing quite lightly with his bow, the instrument responded with a sound somewhat too big for the context.
Schenkman is a notable harpsichordist and it was a pleasure, as always, to hear his performances of the four Scarlatti sonatas, Ks 238, 239, 99 and 100. But this concert was not about him and for the rest of the program he maintained a supportive role to Mobley and Romatowski. The Caldara cantata for voice and continuo is a worthwhile piece on much of the same lines as the Handel ones, from a slightly older composer.
Anna Bon, who must have been a musical prodigy, composed a set of flute sonatas which were published when she was aged 16. The one performed here is the third and is a charmer, ably presented by Romatowski. He also joined the other performers for the last work on the program, the second Handel cantata, “Mi palpita il cor.”
The combination of the four instruments, voice, flute, cello and harpsichord, was effective in a way we could not experience without the use of baroque instruments and vocal style. The interweaving of the different timbral colors by these four expert artists made for an experience to treasure.
