Tag Archives: vespers

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Pacific Musicworks Lets “Glorious Music” of the Monteverdi Vespers Sing

Tenor Charles Daniels (Photo: Hanya Chlala)

The Vespro della beata vergine Monteverdi wrote in 1610 is a sunny work. It’s full of praise for God and for Mary, including several joyful psalms, the Magnificat, exquisite poetry from the Song of Songs and an all-encompassing prayer.

Monteverdi set these words to glorious music, and his Vespers was performed for a large audience Saturday night by Pacific MusicWorks in the appropriate environs and acoustics of St. James Cathedral.

This group, headed by lutenist/conductor/Baroque opera director Stephen Stubbs, has connections all over the world, and such is Stubb’s reputation that he can bring in stellar performers from almost anywhere. Among them Saturday night were the great cornetto player Bruce Dickey who lives in Italy but has a Canadian tour coming up shortly so could come here first, and tenor Charles Daniels who came from England just for this. Both have performed the Vespers with Stubbs many times in Europe, and Stubbs considers Daniels the best Monteverdi tenor performing today.

In Stubb’s view, the Vespers were written for a small group of top quality professional singers and instrumentalists such as Monteverdi would have had at his disposal at San Marco in Venice, and which Stubbs assembled for his performance: a total of nine solo singers and fourteen instrumentalists including himself.

Right from the start, the performance’s high caliber became obvious, with Daniels’ clarion tenor ringing out, the high cornettos sounding like velvet and the pure sound of the two sopranos hanging in the air. With the chorus (all nine soloists singing together) and all the musicians, the rich sound of the whole filled the cathedral, and having a small group performing this big work made complete sense. Arranged around the altar, the strings were on one side, cornettos (the brilliant-toned trumpet forerunner) and sackbuts (early trombone) a quarter way around, small organ and continuo cello and bass were placed in between as well as baroque harp and a place for Stubbs with his great bass lute, the chitarrone.

Monteverdi mixed up the forces to create plenty of variety. Sometimes, as in the brisk and joyous Psalm 113, he used a double vocal quartet. Others as in the Nigra Sum from the Song of Songs, he used a single tenor. In this, Daniels’ agile expressive voice and almost conversational tempi were closely matched by organ and chitarrone.  The Audi coelum had an echo from tenor Jason McStoots singing in the back of the cathedral, while the gorgeous Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis had the two sopranos, Jolle Greenleaf and Catherine Webster, singing a high slow line in unison, with the instrumental parts dancing around them joyfully.

Despite the uncomfortable seats and poor sight lines, St. James is the perfect place to sing this. Both atmosphere and acoustics are just right.  Words were fairly audible, often a problem here, but the excellent translations were side by side with the Latin and easy to follow.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Vigil or Vespers, Rachmaninov’s Work Gets Serene Treatment from Seattle Choral Company

Seattle Choral Company (Photo: SCC)

No, Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (last performance June 9, 8 p.m., at St. Marks) does not last all night. You aren’t sitting there until the dawn comes up listening to glorious music (though it’s so lovely you might want it never to end).

It was so named when Eastern Orthodox churches put together groups of their liturgical offices to read and sing together, including this one for different offices from dusk to early morning. It actually lasts about an hour.

Rachmaninov composed this supremely serene setting for the vigil in the midst of World War I, not long before the Russian Revolution. It has become well loved outside its church environs, but it felt particularly appropriate to be hearing it as sung by Seattle Choral Company within the walls of St. Mark’s Cathedral Friday night.

The performance began with three other brief works of Orthodox sacred music. Mircea Diaconescu’s Lumina Lina immediately took the listener into the feel of old Orthodox music, albeit with some modern harmonies, and was followed by John Tavener’s Eonia (Eternity) and two prayers from Drei Geistliche Gesänge set by Alfred Schnittke.

A choir of some fifty-plus singers under founding conductor and artistic director Freddie Coleman, SCC has sung the Vigil (also knows as the Vespers) before, most recently eight years ago. From the start, its performance Friday (repeated tonight, Saturday) invoked a sense of gentle peacefulness. Throughout its fifteen sections, Coleman kept the tempi flowing, mostly unhurried and steady but with occasional faster parts. Rachmaninov, not a particularly religious man, nevertheless understood and knew the traditional music of the Church and much of what he wrote for the Vigil lies closely in that vein.

Phrasing and shaping were beautifully subtle, with moments of hushed reverence and others of joyful excitement, while Coleman’s pacing made sure that all the voices, singing unaccompanied for the entire concert, sounded as fresh and warm at the end as at the beginning. There was never any forcing or pushing. Occasional brief solo moments were taken by choir members, notably some pure high tenor singing from Justin Ferris.

Orthodox music is not emotional in a sense of having drama in it, nor much dynamic range. It’s more a cumulative hypnotic effect drawing you further and further into the music and the words which of course are the reason for the music.

SCC sang so clearly that it was quite easy to keep place in the program with the words, and the program itself was a model of how a work like this, sung in a language with which we don’t even share an alphabet, can be brought home to the listeners. A short description preceded the words of each section, and these were in three columns, first the Russian in Cyrillic, then phonetic Russian in our Roman alphabet, lastly the translation.

I hope we don’t have to wait another eight years before Seattle Choral Company sings this again.