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BOSTON BAROQUE
MAJESTIC MONTEVERDI



It would be hard to think of a more unlikely work to book-end the classical-music season than Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine. The Handel and Haydn Society presentation, at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, was unlikely all by itself, incorporating as it did a dance performance staged by Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng. Last weekend at Jordan Hall, Boston Baroque offered a more conventional traversal that largely echoed the strengths and weaknesses of its 1996 Grammy-nominated CD.

Monteverdi conceived his work first for the ducal chapel of the Gonzaga family in Mantua (where he was hoping to be named maestro) and then for San Marco in Venice (where he wound up in 1613). Neither the Majestic Theatre nor Jordan Hall has the kind of ambiance he was writing for, but whereas for H&H Grant Llewellyn deployed the strings and the winds/brass antiphonally, with the continuo in the pit, Boston Baroque director Martin Pearlman had his ensemble clustered center stage, with the singers at the back. Tenor Martin Tucker sang the opening "Deus in adjutorium meum intende" versicle powerfully from the back balcony, and he and Lynton Atkinson (Orfeo and Ulisse in Boston Baroque’s recent Monteverdi concert-opera presentations) were effective on opposite sides of the balcony in "Duo Seraphim," with Frank Kelley on stage. But the 29-voice choir, even when it divided and moved to opposite sides of the stage, tended to get covered by Pearlman’s period orchestra, especially the cornetti.

Pearlman’s conducting of Boston Baroque has always struck me as having more nuance in Monteverdi than in, say, Bach or Handel, and that was true of Friday’s performance, which had gravitas and flow, with firm but discreet support from John Gibbons’s harpsichord (especially at the outset of Psalm 121), Olav Chris Henriksen’s archlute, and Catherine Liddell’s theorbo. The violin duo of Marilyn McDonald and Julie Leven were outstanding in the "Sancta Maria," and if the cornetto trio (Michael Collver, Kiri Tollaksen, Paul Perfetti) were squally at times, they had more personality than the group on Jordi Savall’s recording and were no squallier than Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s. Tucker’s bright tenor energized "Nigra sum"; Atkinson’s more shaded sound did justice to "Audi cœlum." Of the two sopranos, Sharon Baker (Euridice in the Boston Baroque Orfeo) was earth to Kristen Watson’s air. Basses Nicholas Isherwood and Mark Andrew Cleveland did well with what Monteverdi gave them to do.

A spot check of the Boston Baroque CD revealed a similar choral majesty, if not clarity, and instrumental burnish. Harnoncourt’s reading, with what sounds like a bigger orchestra and chorus (including a boy choir), benefits from his idiosyncratic blend of imagination and inflection, but Pearlman, muscular even as he basks in the dark glow of his sackbuts, builds a fervent interpretation that’s worth taking to the new Disney Hall in Los Angeles and then Ravinia and Tanglewood.

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Issue Date: May 14 - 20, 2004
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