RIAS Choir/Kammerakademie Potsdam/Doyle - Mendelssohn, Hensel, and Bach, 14 March 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Mendelssohn: Psalm 115, ‘Nicht unserm Namen, Herr’, MWV A 9
Fanny Hensel: Hiob
Mendelssohn: Ave Maria, op.23 no.2, MWV B 19
Mendelssohn: Hör mein Bitten, MWV B 49
Bach: Cantata, ‘Die Elenden sollen essen’, BWV 75: Sinfonia to the second part
Mendelssohn: Psalm 114, ‘Da Israel aus Ägypten zog,’ op.51

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

Ludwig Mittelhammer (bass)

RIAS Chamber Choir

Kammerakademie Potsdam

Justin Doyle (conductor)

A delightful and enlightening concert from the RIAS Chamber Choir, Kammerakademie Potsdam, Justin Doyle, and an excellent trio of vocal soloists: focusing on Mendelssohn, but also including a cantata by his sister Fanny Hensel and a sinfonia by the family’s musical house god, Johann Sebastian Bach. Mendelssohn’s setting of verses from the 115^th Psalm was the first of five such large-scale settings he made for soloists, chorus, and orchestra between 1829 and 1844. It revealed almost equally strong influence from Bach and Handel, the latter in particular occasionally Mozartified. Here, as throughout, the RIAS Chamber Choir proved admirable in every respect: warm, clear, faultless in pitch and diction. The second of its three movements, a duet with chorus, whilst not un-Handelian in its way of duetting, was less obviously ‘Baroque’ on the surface. Anna Prohaska and Benjamin Bruns offered a mellifluous performance, bassoons and more generally orchestral wind pleasingly audible. The ensuing bass arioso was, similarly, beautifully taken by Ludwig Mittelhammer, with a closing chorus, its opening a cappella, confirming all preceding choral and orchestral virtues. 

Hensel’s 1831 cantata Hiob (‘Job’) sets three pairs of verses from the Book of Job. Three trumpets, timpani, and an excellent mezzo from the choir joined the orchestra and soloists on stage. Here, especially in the opening chorus, Bach’s influence was still stronger: in woodwind writing, figuration, harmony, chromatic lines, and more. It is not pastiche: there were pleasing instances to be heard of nineteenth-century colour and, again, Mozartian mediation (perhaps, in the final chorus, the Haydn of The Creation too). But Hensel had certainly learned her Bachian lessons well, as well indeed as her brother. The central arioso, ‘Warum verbirgest du dein Anlitz’ employs all four soloists, the mezzo’s opening question responded to by the other three, followed by a brief reprise of the former. A third, choral movement once again revealed highly accomplished harmony and counterpoint, the assembled forces under Doyle’s wise leadership performing this – and the rest – with relish and understanding. 

Mendelssohn’s responsorial Ave Maria for tenor, chorus, and orchestra (here two clarinets, two bassoons, three cellos, and two double basses) from 1827 seems to me less inspired. I am not sure Marian devotion was really his thing, though this is of course also a very early work (if later than the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and the Octet). Its central, choral section struck me as more interesting, nimble cello pizzicato offering an uncanny presentiment of the second movement processional from the Italian Symphony. It was, in any case, interesting to hear the piece. 

In the second half, we were in different territory altogether, with far more characteristic Mendelssohn. In the 1844 Hör mein Bitten (or ‘Hear my Prayer’, as most English-speaking listeners will know it), Prohaska brought a welcome sense of drama: not ‘operatic’, but certainly drawing on her rich and varied operatic experience. There were some truly magical passages, not least her sinuous duet with clarinet (partly set against cello pizzicato). With a larger choir and orchestra than one generally hears, as well as increasingly dramatic delivery – overall conception well-shaped indeed – this was worlds away from English cathedral music; it certainly evinced more biting consonants and accompanying verbal meaning. Both have their place, of course, but, closer to a miniature Lobgesang and even to Wagner, here was a splendidly Romantic Mendelssohn, the composer of Elijah and St Paul. 

The Sinfonia to the second part of Bach’s Cantata ‘Die Elenden sollen essen’ received what struck me as a near-ideal performance: warm, cultivated, and welcoming, My only regret was that that was all we heard of the piece. No matter: in Mendelssohn’s 1839 setting of verses from the 114^th Psalm, we had a perfect crown to the concert, surveying in each of its four stanzas a different aspect to the composer’s craft. The integration of Handelian antecedents and the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the second proved a joy, but then so did the simpler questioning homophony of the third, and the glorious jubilation (and struggles) of the fourth. ‘Da Israel aus Ägypten zog’ was always likely to bring echoes of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, but Bach remained as strong a guide. Doyle once again led a fine performance, colourful and directed, in which every word as well as every note told.

Musikfest Berlin (6) – RIAS Chamber Choir/Doyle - Monteverdi Vespers, etc., 16 September 2017

St Hedwig’s Cathedral and Pierre Boulez Saal




Photographs from General Rehearsal: Matthias Heyde

Monteverdi: L’Orfeo: Toccata

Plainsong: Introit, ‘Stabant juxta crucem’
Monteverdi: Missa ‘In illo tempore’
with Salomone Rossi: Sinfonia grave in G minor, Monteverdi: Adoramus te, Christe
 

Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Virgine

interspersed with Salomone Rossi: Sinfonia IX in F major, Sonata XII sopra la
Bergamasca in G major, Canzon per sonar a 4 in G major; Biagio Marini: Sonata in Eco, in G major, Sinfonia ‘La Giustiniana’ in G minor; Rossi: Sinfonia in G minor; Plainsong: Antiphon, ‘Nolite me considerare’

Dorothee Mields, Hannah Morrison (sopranos)

Thomas Hobbs, Andrew Staples, Volker Arndt (tenors)

Andrew Redmond, Stefan Dreximeier (basses)

RIAS Chamber Choir

Capella de la Torre

Justin Doyle (conductor)

A day of Monteverdian delights, which, for me, at least will surely prove the highlight and climax of his 450^th anniversary year. First, I interviewed conductor Justin Doyle about this and, more broadly, his work as new Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the RIAS Chamber Choir. Then to the Bebelplatz nearby, to St Hedwig’s Cathedral, Prussia’s first Roman Catholic church following the Reformation, the land given by Frederick the Great expressly for that purpose. (Toleration is, or at least was, easier when one was probably an atheist. How things have changed, eh, Richard Dawkins…) There under its great dome, modelled on the Pantheon, we heard the Missa ‘In illo tempore’. Then around the corner to the Pierre Boulez Saal, first for a talk by Silke Leopold, followed by a performance of what remains the composer’s most celebrated work, collection, call it what you will: the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, published in 1610 along with the Mass, and dedicated to Pope Paul V.

 

The composer’s first opera – the first great opera – L’Orfeo stands in many ways behind the collection. A modified version of its celebrated opening Toccata may be heard in the opening number – or whatever we want to call it! – of the Vespers. And so it would be here, of course. However, it was a nice surprise here also to hear it played from the cathedral gallery, almost as a call to worship or at least to listening, prior to the Plainsong introi, ‘Stabant iuxta crucem Jesu mater eius’. It sounded, the acoustic notwithstanding, far livelier – and not only in speed – to the rather dutiful account heard earlier in the festival from John Eliot Gardiner. We were, if so inclined, thereby reminded both of the Christianity of Orfeo and the theatricality of Monteverdi’s church music, all the world both a stage and a church. During the introit, the choir took their places beneath the organ pipes, facing the altar, ready for the Mass itself. A flowing ‘Kyrie’, accompanied by both organ and orchestra, benefited from the warmth of the acoustic, as did the ‘Gloria’, which ended with a fine, unexaggerated sense of jubilation. The performing style throughout sounded both suited to and shaped by the particular acoustic of the building: something one might have hoped would go without saying, yet in many performances, alas not. As Monteverdi’s prima prattica counterpoint unfolded, natural, almost unassuming, one realised that the move, never complete, to the seconda prattica was not all gain; no step in musical, or other, history ever is. I loved the imploring quality of the close, ‘Miserere nobis’, to the motet, Adoramus te, Christe, enough to have one feel one should be kneeling. Yet it was the lack of theatricality for its own sake that perhaps spoke most clearly: a trust and belief in the power and, yes, genius of Monteverdi’s music.

 

For the Vespers, in the very different setting of the Pierre Boulez Saal, the performance unfolded on different – physical – levels. Once again, the instrumental call to worship, to listen, to whatever it might be, was made from the first gallery, with the tenor injunction, ‘Deus in adiutorium meum intende!’ heard from the level above. The choir itself and, for the most part, the instrumental ensemble was at ‘ground’ level. In general, the home of the overtly, traditionally ‘sacred’ liturgical music, whereas the more ‘secular’ – and yes, I know the distinction is essentially false – concertos would be heard, at least in their solo parts, from above. The two seraphim, ‘Duo Seraphim’, were heard from higher still: a return, perhaps, to less unambiguous distinction between sacred and profane. Or one could simply experience such distinctions as experiments in spatial awareness. Who is to say what they ‘are’, whether in Monteverdi, in Gabrieli, or indeed in Boulez and Stockhausen?  At any rate, a distinction such as that brought home in the ‘Laudate pueri’ between choral sopranos and the soloist above was meaningful, verbally and musically.

 

The ‘collection’ becomes a ‘work’ in performance – or can be heard to do so, even when, as here, it was joined by instrumental pieces from Monteverdi’s colleagues, Salamone Rossi (Mantua) and Biagio Marini (Venice). It seemed almost to encompass the rest of Monteverdi’s work too: not just Orfeo at the opening (and in the Magnificat’s reminder of Orpheus in Hades), but the courtly, madrigalian soprano duetting of ‘Pulchra es’. Or is it later opera, even Poppea, of which we hear a fortelling? It need not be either or, and certainly was not in practice; sopranos Dorothee Mields and Hannah Morrison would clearly have been comfortable in any or all guises. ‘Swing’ might be an anachronism too far, not least since it perhaps misleads; what one needs above all is security of rhythm and metre. Nevertheless, it was a joy to hear something approximating to it in the cries of ‘Jerusalem’ from ‘Laetatus sum’. Likewise the contrasting plaintive quality, again never unduly exaggerated, never disruptive, later on. Here and elsewhere, Doyle and the Choir, well trained, and thus able to unleash its abundant musicality, offered readings that were not only thoughtful but delightful.

 

So too with the tenor seraphim, Thomas Hobbs and Andrew Staples; again, rightly or wrongly, I could not help but think of the world of Poppea. Gender is a complex matter in Monteverdi; after all, it is also a tenor who sings ‘Nigra sum’ (and very well he did so too). The tenor echo (Staples) from the heavens in ‘Audi coelum’ beautifully complemented Hobbs from the gallery below: distant, different, yet changing too, according to the demands of the text. There is almost an endless variety of ways to perform this music, but everything here had been thought through, not so as to limit but so as to enable spontaneity and, yes, drama in performance. When the choir responded, ‘Omnes hanc ergo sequamur…’, to what it had heard, it was almost as if a prayer were being answered, yet the mystery of grace remained. There are no easy answers here, musical or theological. An instrumental response seemed just the thing in turn, a fruity bassoon (sorry, dulcian) from the Capella de la Torre ensemble delighting in turn.

 

Following the interval, an instrumental invitation to dance-cum-worship was extended, leading us in to the extraordinary ‘Sonata sopra sancta Maria’. Female members of the choir reappeared, whilst the soloists appeared lightly lit (and lightly conducted) in what one might have taken for alcoves, mediating apparitions of saints themselves. Responses might be heard from all over, just as in the church or the world themselves. Stockhausen could eat his heart out – and most likely would have done. The ‘Ave maris stella’ sounded as a hymn in more than name, blossoming into something akin to a presentiment of a Bach chorale prelude, and even beyond, to Classical variation form. As for the closing ‘Magnificat’, I am not sure that it is not an even finer setting than Bach’s – and became even less sure here. This might not be a ‘work’ in the modern sense; if so, so much the worse for the modern sense. Whatever the truth of that, this was a crowning glory, in which, so it seemed, everything came together, greater than the sum of its parts. As an encore, we were treated to an aural glimpse of ‘what happened next’: Cavalli’s Salve regina, almost Schubert to Monteverdi’s Mozart, with none of the stiffness that often befalls performance of music that is far more difficult than it might often look or sound.

 

Interview with Justin Doyle: from Monteverdi to MacMillan with the RIAS Chamber Choir

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…