Klosterkirche St Anna im Lehel, Munich
Etienne Moulinié – Si mes soupirs sont indiscrets; Bien que l’Amour; O che gioia
Charles Hurel – PréludeNicolas Hotman – Allemande
Pierre Corneille – Psyché: ‘A peine je vous vois’
Michel Lambert – Ombre de mon amant; Vos mépris chaque jour
Sieur de Sainte-Colombe – Les Couplets
Sébastien le Camus – Laissez durer la nuit; Ah! Fuyons ce dangereux séjour; Amour, cruel Amour
Michel Lambert – Rochers, vous êtes sourds
Robert de Visée – Prélude; La Mascarade: Rondeau; Chaconne
Jean de La Fontaine – Fables, Livre XII, 14: ‘L’Amour et la Folie’
Charpentier – Profitez du printemps; Celle qui fait tout mon tourment; Au bord d’une fontaine; Sans frayeur dans de bois
Marin Marais – Pièces de viole, 3ème livre: Prélude and Grand ballet
Couperin – Zéphire, modère en ces lieux
Claire Lefilliâtre (soprano)
Friederike Heumann (viola da
gamba)
Fred Jacobs (theorbo) |
| Klosterkirche St Anna, 1727-33 |
In many respects, this second ‘Festspiel-Barockkonzert’ made for an intriguing pendant to the
previous night’s premiere
of Les Indes galantes. All of the
music was earlier than Rameau’s opéra-ballet, some of that in the first half –
the programme was broadly but not pedantically chronological – considerably
earlier. Music from the court of Louis XIV covers, after all, a good number of
years, the king having reigned between 1643 and 1715. The works by Marais and
Couperin at the close were probably the latest, both dated 1711, four years
before Louis's death. Rather to my surprise, although not without exception,
it was the first half that proved more compelling as a performance to me.
Perhaps that was partly a matter of having tired a little; although this
repertory certainly interests me, I can lay no claim to great expertise. One has
to listen intently to appreciate its subtleties and its variety, just as one
does with, say, the music of Luigi Nono. Maybe, then, I am – perhaps unusually -
more accustomed to listening to Nono.
For there was certainly variety
in the programming, within its chronological and courtly framework. Its French
title – ‘Au bord d’une fontaine – Airs et Brunettes’ – alluded nicely not only
to one of the Charpentier works and implicitly to Versailles itself, but also
to the celebrated 1721 collection of songs arranged for flute by Jacques
Hotteterre, ‘Airs et brunettes a deux et trois dessus pour les flutes
traversieres tirez des meilleurs autheurs, anciens et modernes, ensembles les
airs de Mrs. Lambert, Lully, De Bousset, &c les plus convenables a
la flute traversiere seule, ornez d'agremens par Mr. Hotteterre Ie Romain et
recueillis par M. ++++.’ And so, rather than arrangements, we heard ‘originals’,
mostly vocal, with Claire Lefilliâtre as soprano, but with instrumental interludes,
from viola de gamba (Friederike Heumann), theorbo (Fred Jacobs), and the two
instruments in concert. We also heard a couple of recitations, Lefilliâtre
reading from Corneille and La Fontaine.
What I think I missed most of all,
especially during the second half, was something more outgoing in Lefilliâtre’s
vocal performances. Now there is much to be gained from intimacy, which I
valued greatly in the vocal music of Etienne Moulinié and Michel Lambert in particular,
and not all of this music, indeed not much of it, is ‘operatic’, whether in a
seventeenth- or a more modern sense. By the same token, however, there were
times when, despite trying to listen as I could, I missed a greater sense of
variation both within and between pieces.
The Italianate style of some of
the first-half performances – more than once, I thought of Cavalli – initially surprised
me, until I reflected on Cavalli’s own Ercole
armante, commissioned by Mazarin for the 1662 wedding of Louis to Marie-Thérèse.
As the harpsichordist Luke Green reminded me afterwards, the roots go back
further, however: to the influence of Marie de Medici. Such tendencies are not
absent, of course, even in Charpentier and Couperin; not only did I miss them
being brought to the vocal foreground more strongly, however; I missed much of
what made those composers different, more modern. Their music looks forward to
Rameau as well as back to the earlier years of Louis’s reign. A further oddity
was the inconsistency in Lefilliâtre’s ‘historical’ pronunciation, whether in
the declamatory Corneille or the vocal items. I have no particularly strong
feelings either way about the practice as such, whether in my own language or
another, but it was unclear to me why some word endings should be pronounced
and others not. Details matter in most music, but they certainly do here.
Diction and intonation could sometimes be a little wayward too.
There was, though, a moving
sincerity to Lefilliâtre’s performances at their best – enhanced for me by the
warmth of the church acoustic, although others . Tales of love and death – are they
not often one and the same? – drew one in. So too, very much, did not only the ‘accompaniments’
but the instrumental items. Heumann’s gamba playing proved her not only
mistress of her instrument but above all a deeply sensitive musician, responding
to it just as a fine pianist would to Chopin. The pieces from Marais’s Pièces de viole sounded not only as
justly acclaimed summits of this still little-known (at least beyond certain
circles) repertory, but as instrumental music fully fit to hold its own with
more celebrated successors. Likewise Jacobs’s theorbo playing, pulse always
clear, and for that reason capable of meaningful rather than arbitrary
modification. I do not think I had heard the music of Robert de Visée before;
it emerged in Jacobs’s hands as something clearly worthy of further
exploration. And that, whatever certain reservations regarding vocal
performances, is surely the point.
