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| From General Rehearsal for the Monteverdi Vespers in the Pierre Boulez Saal Images: Matthis Heyde |
For his first concerts as Chief
Conductor and Artistic Director of the RIAS Chamber Choir, Justin Doyle finds
himself very much in at the deep end: dual-venue performances of Monteverdi’s
1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin
(at the Pierre Boulez Saal) and the Missa ‘In illo tempore’, with which it was
published (just around the corner, at St Hedwig’s Cathedral). ‘Finds himself’,
one might ask, or was he pushed? I was lucky enough to be able to do so, on the
lunchtime in between the first, Friday evening performances, and the second
ones on Saturday afternoon (the latter to be reviewed shortly).
Doyle first spoke
enthusiastically about the ambitions of the Musikfest Berlin, of which these
concerts were part, and admitted that he would not necessarily immediately have
chosen to perform the Vespers in the
Boulez Saal. ‘It was their idea,’ he said, ‘but a very interesting one.’ Not
the least of its difficulties, for such a performance, is its oval shape. What
might seem to be a circle – like, say, the basilica for the Mass – is not. When
I attended the first half of the General Rehearsal on the Thursday afternoon,
it was, Doyle told me, the first time that the performers had been in that
space, and certain changes had to be made concerning seating; sometimes, he had
found himself unable to make eye contact with the performers. For a performance
involving quite a bit of moving around, matters were thus complicated further.
Rehearsals involve a great deal other than merely rehearsing. In this case,
too, it involved speaking to performers, radio engineers, and various others, in
a language other than his own ‘With no voice too,’ I learned, adding only to my
admiration. (Yes, I know that others must do the former all the time, yet for
us Englishmen and –women, it often comes far less easily.) ‘Everyone in the
choir speaks English,’ of course, ‘but I made a conscious decision, even though
it was twenty-four years since I’d done German at school, that it breaks down a
barrier and it shows a degree of humility’: something, it might be added, for
which conductors are not always renowned.
I went on to ask which edition
he was using: an especially fraught question in the case of this work – or rather,
as I would doubtless correct any of my students, ‘collection’, itself a
distinction that gets to the heart of the problems, as well as the
opportunities. ‘It’s from OUP: Jeffrey Kurtzman,’ a performing score made, it
might be added, after considerable time studying the questions as well as the
sources. That, at least was the score the choir was using, but Doyle had clearly
made a thorough investigation of his own: not only because he said so, but
because he spoke so clearly, intelligently, and informatively concerning what
he had done. He had consulted every edition and more than that: ‘There are not
a lot of stones I haven’t turned over in the last six months. And I keep going
back to the same stones and having another look, and changing my mind. Between
the General [Rehearsal] and yesterday, I changed a lot.’ What sort of thing?
Presumably not who was singing or playing what, and when? No, but quite a few
changes, not least on account of the venues, with respect, for instance to the
cadential fermatas. ‘Are they actually stop fermatas?’ Does, for instance, ‘the
sound need to go somewhere? And there’s nowhere for the sound to go.’ The
partbook, for example, tells us something different from the Chorstimmen.’ Kurtzmann ‘lets you into
his decisions, but … doesn’t box you into a corner. His notes are very useful
and his book is exemplary. He shows his own ambivalence about certain
performing decisions and his reasoning is always sensible.’ Just, then, what is
needed for a particular performance in a particular – especially a rather
unexpected – performing space.
Katharina Bäuml, the leader of
the instrumental ensemble, Capella de la Torre, had also contributed, however. ‘She
produced the instrumental parts, because we decided to do quite a lot of colla parte’ playing, that is (usually),
when conductor and/or instrumentalist should follow the tempo and indeed rhythm
of the vocal soloist(s). That made a nice contrast, Doyle thought – and such
had been my experience in the rehearsal – with the use of only organ for the ‘Laudate
pueri’. Monteverdi ‘says solo voices and organ,’ he explained, ‘but it’s a bit
up for grabs quite what that means’. The way in which the movement could build,
then, into something more than that meant that it could mirror ‘what the concerti do, starting with one solo
voice, then two, three, and so on’.
‘As a collection, that’s
clearly part of what he’s trying to do. But is it a structure as well?’ A bit
like in the Selva morale e spirituale,
I suggested. ‘Exactly. And that’s how collections tend to work. But this is
full of very interesting touches. The first concerto is “Nigra sum”,’ which of
course is a man singing “I am black and beautiful”, a female text. It’s a very
similar text, but not quite the same, as that to the antiphons to several
Marian feasts. Is it “filia Jerusalem” or “filiae Jerusalem”? Is it a “black
but beautiful daughter of Jerusalem”? Or is it “black but beautiful, o ye daughters
of Jerusalem”? Decisions like that: is it “a” or “ae”: do you go with the
liturgical partbook or another source or possibility? … So we produce our own
instrumental parts.’
That reminded me of something I
had been intending to ask following something I had observed in rehearsal, and
which I had long wondered about when it came to conducting the work. How
difficult is it to handled the metrical changes involved and yet, as Doyle had
put it during that rehearsal, immediately for the performers to ‘lock in’ to a
new tempo? A case in point would be the ‘Sonata sopra Sancta Maria. ‘It’s not
really that difficult. But we were all quite new to the space. The trick is
always to prepare. I’m not actually beating like a normal conductor; it’s much
more waft here, because you don’t want to get in the way too much here either. With
respect to the tactus, it’s a down
and an up. Is it cut-C or C? If you look at the part books, the partis generalis often has a cut-C; the
others have C. Maddening! So if you go the Roger Bowers route,’ for which, see
his Music and Letters article, ‘it cannot quite work – it’s
interesting, but ultimately it must have broken down, because the part books
didn’t match each other. So it tells me that the organist is being reminded
that it’s a quicker tactus: as simple
as that. If you go through the Magnificat,
all those different sections sort of all work with the same tactus. Whether it’s a one- or a
half-tactus, you’ll hear the difference, of course.’ I shall not even attempt
to write out the musical demonstration he gave me, but it unquestionably convinced.
‘As long as you’re doing the maths three bars earlier, you will be fine, with
preparation. And I can show it. But by last night, we’d prepared so that I
could more or less stop conducting it. Get them singing and then abdicate.’
How much, then, of a
distinction is there here, or should there be here, between choir and soloists?
Should one think of them separately at all? ‘I’ve always thought of it as an eight-voice
piece, not unlike Andrew Parrott says. Elsewhere, I’d probably do it with
individual voices, because there’s not a lot for the individual soloists to do,
the ladies in particular. Or I could have done it by giving solos to individual
members of the choir, but that puts a lot of pressure on them to be major
soloists in the same concert, and I thought then that I wouldn’t have the
dramatic [spatial] possibilities. So to have extra bodies does help.’ That
said, all the members of the choir would be capable of it, and indeed here they
had a mixture: the third tenor, Volker Arndt, for instance, would be stepping
out of the choir (very successfully) from time to time. Moreover, the ‘warmth
and the luxury feel’ of a German choir, partly born of the greater rehearsal
time available by comparison to an English choir, helped further dissolve any
distinction. ‘It goes in deeper,’ as opposed to the traditional English ‘shortcut’
of sightreading and minimal rehearsal. Not that he wanted the tenors to sound
the same: Arndt, Thomas Hobbs, and Andrew Staples all had different voices, but
they would complement each other.
Ultimately, though, decisions
would always come down to the following sensible principle: ‘Work out what
Monteverdi would have done. Work out whether that was his ideal, or just what
had to happen. Did he, for instance, have double reeds? Probably not. Or
rather, he would have had them in Mantua, but not in the cathedral. And then
whether they played in Venice or not; certainly for the festivals they had
them. But if he had had players who could play as well as this, would he have used them more? And would he have used more
singers if he had had them? And this is a RIAS Kammerchor concert. They can
pretty much do everything.’
We closed, doubtless
predictably on my part, by talking a little about the man whose name – and
example – adorns the hall: Pierre Boulez. Boulez never conducted the Vespers,
but thought very highly of Monteverdi – who would not? – and planned at one point
to conduct the work as part of his opening concert season for a reformed Paris
Opera (a project that, sadly, never came into being). He also spoke fondly of
having heard Roger Désormière rehearse the work. I asked Doyle whether he could
imagine what Boulez might have brought to the work, almost certainly conducting
it on modern instruments, and certainly with a high modernist aesthetic. Would his
own approach have anything in common with this imaginary performance, not that
it need do so? Doyle had always had the regret of having had to turn down the
opportunity to assist Boulez with the BBC Singers for a Prom, ‘because I was on
honeymoon. Everyone has regrets, but that would have been a very short
marriage, I think, otherwise. I think, though, given this room, and given that
this is a festival concert, I think he would have done something quirky. I’ve
put in sandwiches of vocal and instrumental movements, so there’s a nice logic
to it. He wasn’t mathematical – well he was, but he wasn’t only that – but he
was precise. And I have an instinctive drama about me, I think, which can
sometimes be a little bit crazy, but I also have to plan a lot. And the more
you plan, the more you can release that drama.’ Rather than be merely arbitrary?
‘Precisely. Never just whimsy: planned whimsy. So I think Boulez would rather
have liked this, especially with the pre-concert concert [the Mass], in a
different space, making use of what is different, as well as what they have in
common.’ Why, I asked, could we not have more of his programming too: Machaut and Webern, Bartók and mediæval coronation music? ‘We can – and we will,’ I was
assured.
With that in mind, and our time
almost up, Doyle pointed me to the choir’s debut concert early next year in the
Großer Saal of Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie. Playing with the Ensemble
Resonanz: the Choir, under his direction, will perform Bach,
Victoria, Henze, and James MacMillan. If only the website did not already read
ausverkauft…
