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Handel and Haydn’s Monteverdi, the Bostonians’ Wagner
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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The classical season in Boston opened last weekend with ambitious undertakings by the city’s oldest classical aggregation, the Handel and Haydn Society (founded in 1815), and its newest, Richard Conrad’s the Bostonians (founded in 2003). As if Claudio Monteverdi’s monumental 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine weren’t challenge enough, H&H presented the first ever staging of this work, with Chinese stage director Chen Shi-Zheng orchestrating a troupe of seven dancers. And former Boston Adademy of Music (it’s now Opera Boston) director Richard Conrad introduced the Bostonians with a six-hour Wagner marathon last Saturday in which the Siegfried Idyll was played in its original orchestration and excerpts from each of the music dramas were performed. Monteverdi’s œuvre, like that of his near-contemporary William Shakespeare, seems to step out of time, looking at once backward and forward; and like Shakespeare’s it can accommodate almost any degree of modern interpretation. The Vespro della Beata Vergine, which he wrote for the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua, just before removing to Venice, intersperses antiphons (omitted in this performance), psalms, and motets, finishing with a sonata on "Sancta Maria ora pro nobis," the hymn "Ave maris stella," and the Magnificat. At the Cutler Majestic, Yi Liming’s stage was boxed in by a textured metallic material, with the vocal choir ranged along the back, the brass and wind choirs stage right and the string choir stage left, facing each other antiphonally, and H&H music director Grant Llewellyn and the continuo instruments in the Majestic "pit," so that ample space was left for the dancers. The evening began with a silent five-minute slide show depicting mostly Far Eastern Madonnas, along with a recurrent photograph of a Chinese peasant carrying a statue of the Blessed Virgin — Chen Shi-Zheng’s reminder that to many Asians Mary is an ikon of universal love. He had some 500 statues of Virgin in various sizes brought in from a village in southern China; the orchestral podia and the stage were lined with 100 or so medium-sized ones, and smaller models appeared under the podia, as if holding the musicians up. After the opening versicle and response, the seven dancers — six women and one man (four from Indonesia, two from China, one from Japan) dressed in simple white tops and blue or pink bottoms — processed one by one on stage each carrying a life-size statue while the choir sang the "Dixit Dominus." The statues were set down, moved, revered, implored, danced to (and almost with) before being clustered downstage left. In the "Nigra sum" motet that followed, six dancers clustered upstage right, their backs to us, while Restu Imansari Kusumanigrum moved among the statues and then interacted with tenor Gerald Thomas Gray. For the psalm "Laudate pueri," the dancers, holding the statues aloft, formed the rotating diameter of a circle; "Laetatus sum" found a trio twirling silver rods. At one point a dancer operated a remote-control Mary on a small platform. The Magnificat climaxed with three women dancers being enclosed by descending transparent sheaths (they looked like plastic shower curtains) and raised aloft. As Llewellyn and Chen (who’ll be directing Charles Mee’s Snow in June for the ART in December) freely admitted, this work is still developing (the original concept for the Magnificat included 200 or so Virgins suspended from the ceiling, but there wasn’t time to work out the technical problems). To the extent that these Asian dance forms address inner rather than outer space, they were suited to Monteverdi; but the Japanese and Chinese dancers weren’t completely integrated into the predominating Javanese court style, and at times the loose organization of (and lack of ensemble among) the dancers was at odds with the majesty of the music. Restu Imansari Kusumanigrum stood out in her "Nigra sum" solo and her "Audi cœlum" duet with Eko Supriyanto; elsewhere he seemed incongruously aggressive. The musical performance too will want to tighten up if this undertaking is, as H&H hopes, to have an international future (Sadler’s Wells is interested). There were flat notes from the period strings and bobbles in the brass and winds; more problematic was the overall movement, sometimes sing-songy where it needed to be subtle and static where it needed to strut (as in the 6/8 sections of the "Sancta Maria"), in a work where the international performance standard is extremely high (Nikolaus Harnoncourt with the Concentus musicus Wien is my benchmark). The choir sounded indistinct at first; matters improved as members moved downstage. The solos were commendable, though only Thomas’s "Nigra sum" and Pauly Murrihy’s "Sancta Maria" stayed with me. Yi Liming’s lighting was complex and at one moment spectacular: the beginning of the "Ave maris stella" turned the choir into silhouettes against a violet evening glow. SATURDAY AT THE FIRST AND SECOND CHURCH, after a heroic Siegfried fanfare from French-horn player John Aubrey, Richard Conrad introduced the debut of the Bostonians by noting that his idea of a Wagner marathon had been called "either an oxymoron or a redundancy." I’d have called it a bargain: some six hours (including two half-hour intermissions) of prime Wagner singing and playing, up close and personal, for $30. Conrad set the tone for the afternoon with "Blick’ ich umher," in which Wolfram von Eschenbach addresses the company in the hall of the minstrels, singing, "I look about at this noble gathering, whose lofty appearance warms my heart." It was a tribute both to the 75 audience members and to those 45 of Conrad’s friends who were about to make the First and Second Church a Boston hall of minstrels. And the sentiment was upheld in his performance, which was warm and noble and delivered from memory. The other highlight of the first three hours (after which I had to leave, with extreme reluctance) was "Weiche, Wotan, weiche," in which Erda tells Wotan to give back the ring; also singing from memory, Marion Dry was so natural, so earnest, and so commanding that I wanted to plop George W. down in front of her (not that it would have done any good). The worst that could be said for the rest was that Thomas Hojnacki’s uncertain piano accompaniment took the zing out of the Walküre chorus "Hejotoho" and that sopranos Jenny Lind Robinson and, to a lesser degree, Andrea Matthews were reduced to shrieking by their arias from Die Feen. But the eight Valkyries — Ellen Chickering, Margaret O’Keefe, Bonnie Scarpelli, Gale Fuller, Marion Dry, Laurie Lemley, Laura Bewig Chritton, and Jenny Lind Robinson — ranged across the stage were a visual and vocal feast; and as Conrad reminded me at intermission, those arias — "they’re killers" — are one of the reasons the early Die Feen didn’t premiere till 1888, after Wagner’s death. There was animated, characterful singing all around: Susan Forrester and Wayne Rivera in Rienzi; Rivera, Margaret O’Keefe, and David Cushing in Der fliegende Holländer; Mark Morgan, Andrea Matthews, Bryan MacNeil, Mark Nemeskal, Craig Hanson, and Laurie Lemley in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. There was exemplary accompaniment from Beverly Orlove, Michael Budewitz, and William Merrill. There were witty introductions, like Rivera’s explanation that the Steuermann’s aria "is usually accompanied by a chorus, but they’re still on vacation in Norway, so the tenor gets a workout." Conrad still knows how to put on a show; this one should whet appetites for his production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors in December.
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