For International Women's Day

For International Women's Day

Prohaska/Arcangelo/Cohen - Lachrimae, 2 August 2015

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Dowland – Lachrimae Pavane

Tarquinio Merula – Hor ch’e tempo di dormir
Purcell – The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation
Cavalli – Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne: ‘O più d’ogni richezza’
Giovanni Felice Sances – Usurpator Tiranno
Purcell – Sonata in G minor, Z.807, from Ten Sonatas in Four Parts
Strozzi – Diporti de Euterpe, op.7: ‘Lagrime mie’
Dowland – Flow my Tears
Strozzi – Che si può fare
Salomone Rossi – Sonata terza sopra l’aria romanesca
Purcell – The Fairy Queen: ‘The Plaint: O let me weep’
Scarlatti – Sonata in D minor, K.90, arranged for violin and continuo
Cavalli – La Calisto: ‘Restino imbalsamate’
Purcell – An Evening Hymn

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Arcangelo
Jonathan Cohen (director)

I apologise that this will not be a ‘review’ as such. That is not primarily because Anna Prohaska, the soloist, is a friend of mine. (I think a lot of nonsense is spoken about such things. It is the nature of things that, sometimes one has to write about a performance, a book, a musical work by someone one knows. It may in some ways render the task more difficult, but it may also afford insights. Honesty is the best policy here – and indeed anywhere else.) However, I was unable to buy a programme – the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ran out very soon, and only offered them again for the second half, which struck me as extortion – and was thus unable to follow the texts and translations, and indeed in many cases was unaware what was being performed. Quite a good test of one’s ear in many ways: I was delighted to recognise one of Cavalli’s two arias and to guess that he was the composer of another (from a work I thought I knew, but which I clearly do not know well enough!) I was still more delighted to hear works by Barbara Strozzi, whose music I have long admired, but whom we hear far too little: alas, we all know why. I wanted simply to post the programme, discovered from Arcangelo’s website after the event, to remind me what I had seen and heard.

 

If you will permit me – and even if not – I should like to say that Anna gave an intensely dramatic performance, quite befitting the theatrical location. I very much liked the way the various works fitted together and suggested moods and even narratives greater than the sum of their parts. A hint, and sometimes more than that, of the wilder world of the Mediterranean was sometimes present, especially in Strozzi’s music. (I know I am being ungrateful, but a little Monteverdi would have been greatly appreciated too. When, however, would that not be the case?) Moreover, whilst I am, as any regular readers will know, anything but a paid-up member of the period-instrument lobby, I found Arcangelo’s performances, on their terms and indeed often on mine, mostly highly convincing, even if I could not quite work out what an arrangement of a Scarlatti keyboard sonata was doing there. The Playhouse is, whatever its acoustical problems for the performers, an interesting and, yes, beautiful space; I look forward to seeing a play or an opera there. I shall stop now, lest this turn into an actual review, whatever that might be…

Sampson/Wadsworth - 'Echoes of Venice', 3 January 2013

Wigmore Hall

 

Monteverdi – Si dolce è’l tormento

Barbara Strozzi – Rissolvetevi pensieri (from op.6)
Alessandro Piccinini – Toccata X
Ciaccona in partite variate
Strozzi – L’amante segreto (from op.2)
Giovanni Kapsberger – Libro quarto d’intavolatura di chitarrone: Passacaglia
Strozzi – Che si può fare
Francesca Caccini – Lasciatemi morire
Benedetto Ferrari – Voglio di vita uscir
Piccinini – Toccata VI
Partita variate sopra quest’aria francese detta l’Alemana
Corrente terza
Strozzi – L’Eraclita amoroso (from op.6)

Carolyn Sampson (soprano)

Matthew Wadsworth (theorbo)

 

 

In a fit of excessive New Year enthusiasm, I initially typed the year for this recital as 3013. It transpires that an additional millennium has not yet passed, though nevertheless a degree of time travel somehow seemed comforting on a dark early January night, that time travel taking us back to seventeenth-century Venice. Monteverdi one might have expected, yet he appeared but once, at the very beginning – and what a change it was to hear in a recital focused upon any period or none, the music of not just one but two female composers.

 

Monteverdi’s Si dolce e’l tormento was as notable for its theorbo ‘accompaniment’, Matthew Wadsworth offering considerable variation in attack, dynamic contrast, and mood, as for Carolyn Sampson’s intelligent ornamentation, admirably suited to the text. Barbara Strozzi provided the greater part of what remained of the first half. Sampson and Wadsworth showing her to be far more than an ‘interesting historical figure’. Despite the strophic form of the Monteverdi item, Strozzi’s Rissolvetevi, pensieri sounded in a sense simpler, perhaps more of a song in the modern sense, melody very much to the fore. At the same time, here and elsewhere, one felt that the opera stage was not so very distant; both ‘song’ and ‘aria’, then, seemed apposite frames of reference. L’amante segreto sounded almost as an operatic scena. Its plaintiveness was established from the outset by Sampson; even if one did not have, or did not understand, the words, one would readily have guessed their meaning. Her voice sounded ‘pure’ without the bloodlessness that afflicts a good number of ‘early music’ sopranos. This sounded very much as the post-Cavalli music that it is, certain aspects of melody and harmony recalling Strozzi’s teacher. Che si può fare was likewise beautifully sung. If, for my taste, a little more vibrato would not have gone amiss, there was nothing aggressive about its denial and there was no denying the cleanness of Sampson’s tone and the sincerity of her delivery.

 

In between the Strozzi items came solo pieces for Wadsworth. A little of such music goes a long way for me, I am afraid; I suspect it is infinitely more rewarding for the player than the listener, especially when the latter finds himself in a relatively large hall. (A seventeenth-century octagon room, such as that at Salzburg’s Schloss Hellbrunn, might well offer a different experience.) In the two pieces by Alessandro Piccinini, Wadsworth was an admirable guide, happy to leaven his tone with vibrato. The constant need to retune is a bit of a bore, but the fault lies with the instrument, not the performer. A passacaglia by Giovanni Kapsberger was cleverly programmed so that its ground bass ran straight into Strozzi’s Che si può fare, the solo item functioning as a prelude.  

 

Francesca Caccini, daughter of Giulio, opened the second half. Her ‘Lasciatemi qui solo’ was again song-like, seemingly in the tradition of her father’s music. Sampson’s Italian sometimes sounded a little careful, though meaning was always conveyed in an intimate performance, her deathly closing whisper, ‘Gia sono esangu’e smorto,’ a case in point. Benedetto Ferrari’s ‘Voglio di vita uscir’, despite its title, offered a lively contrast, something of a relief given the general tenor of the programme. Monteverdi sounded closer than elsewhere, both Zefiro torna and the notorious closing duet of L’incoronazione di Poppea – Ferrari a prime candidate as composer – coming to mind. Three more pieces by Piccinini followed. Again they were clearly well performed, yet to my doubtless untutored ears they proved rather tedious; perhaps some people feel the same about nineteenth-century piano music, but I think I shall stick with Chopin and Liszt. Strozzi’s L’Eraclito amoroso seemed to breathe the world of a small opera stage, though equally one could imagine it properly in more intimate surroundings, performed by the composer herself.  

 

If it would be difficult to claim any of this repertoire, even Monteverdi’s contribution, as ‘great’ music, much of it affords ample interest, especially when performed as well as here. It was a pity, then, that the programme note, arguably more important for listeners in a concert of unfamiliar repertoire than in, say, a performance of Winterreise, was often confusing and/or poorly written. Rick Jones’s opening sentences read as follows:

In 1612, Venice ended 45-year old Monteverdi’s year of unemployment since walking out on Mantua. He’d become famous through his operas Orfeo and the lost Arianna [certainly not lost in 1612!], and defended his ideas in the press, so that most employers were afraid to take him on. The merchant city state in the north was up for it though and never regretted it.

 
Alas, matters did not improve thereafter. It was a rare lapse, though, in terms of the Wigmore Hall’s typically high standards and did not detract unduly from the music, which for the most part spoke very well for itself.

 

As an encore, we were offered the English folksong, ‘I will give my love an apple’. Wadsworth explained that it was a somewhat oblique contribution to Britten year, given that Britten once set the song. At any rate, this was a loving and lovely performance.