Review of Cambridge Early Music’s performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers: Solomon’s Knot
At West Road Concert Hall on Wednesday evening Cambridge Early Music presented the talented baroque ensemble Solomon’s Knot in a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers, a powerful, at times almost overwhelming, devotional master work.
Vespers was composed in the period that would soon mark Monteverdi’s departure from the Court of Mantua and his arrival as the maestro di cappella of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice which had engaged him, attracted by the success of his Vespers in 1610. Monteverdi’s main interest, however, lay in the composition of operas and he apparently saw his religious music as something of a distraction.
Although his three surviving operas (out of probably ten such works, some lost) are outmatched numerically by his exact contemporary Handel’s output (in excess of 40), Monteverdi was, like Handel, essentially a man of the theatre, and his Vespers are filled with astonishing expressive moments of drama and dramatic effect.
Like his other great contemporary, J.S Bach, Monteverdi at St Mark’s had the same busy life, providing and arranging music on a daily basis for the Church’s liturgical year.
Monteverdi’s Venice, however, with a culture unlike that which surrounded Bach in Germany, was a hub of cosmopolitanism and allowed the composer to absorb and make use of multiple genres: Eastern liturgical chant, music of the synagogues and Arab traders (see e.g. Movement 7 ‘Duo Seraphim’), the popular music of Italy, secular music of France and the church music of the Vatican.
Vespers, essentially being for Monteverdi the evening service of the Roman Catholic Church, comprises a sequence from the psalms and other religious texts and is devoted to reverence of Our Lady.
The work is a unique (for its times) assembly of textures and techniques where it is possible throughout to detect an audacious revolutionary spirit, revealing a tension between traditional plainsong chant and innovative daring rhythms and subject material.
There are sometimes startling juxtapositions, ranging from the erotic intimacy of Movement 3, ‘Nigra Sum’, to passages which extol the purity of Mary. This was unlike any sacred music that had been heard before, it was music distinctly ahead of its times.
As an ‘operatic’ composer Monteverdi insisted that the words of a composition should dictate its harmony. So, for example, in Movement 4 of his Vespers, ‘Laudate Pueri Domine’ the rising register of the music reflects the meaning of the text ‘Suscitans a terra inopem…’ ‘He raiseth the simple from the dust, and lifteth the poor from the mire.’
Solomon’s Knot performed all the elements of this complex work with equal musicianship, from passages requiring power and energy, to those of quietude and introspection.
Where one might occasionally anticipate in some liturgical music a possible tendency to tire the listener, Vespers in the confident execution of Solomon’s Knot simply grew in its potency to exhilarate and enrapture, especially in the masterful final passages which celebrate the Blessed Virgin (Movements 11, 12 and 13).
It was constantly fascinating to watch the group form and re-form, assemble and re-assemble both on stage, and sometimes within the hall at large and among the audience, as they created specific effects.
The top-ranking voices of all ten vocalists were complemented by brass, organ, wind and string players who beautifully created an authenticity of sound.
Here, one felt, was in Monteverdi a precursor of the Romantic self, speaking from within the deepest recesses of the spirit. As with Bach’s music (revived in the C19th), the music of Monteverdi, immensely popular in its own period, had likewise faded from prominence until the Vespers from the mid-C20th onwards gave its composer due recognition as a major ‘voice’ for our own times.
And much as in the way Beethoven spanned two periods as he forged Romantic music from his classical inheritance to become its major voice, Monteverdi, with his innovative, refreshing, alert and lively approach stands at the very crossroads of Renaissance and Baroque music, and invites us even further beyond.
It was difficult, for probably most of us in the audience, to grasp the level of dedication and attention to detail that would have been required of the musicians to achieve such excellence in performing this demanding, multi- layered composition. The least we could do was to give Solomon’s Knot a standing ovation. This they were enthusiastically awarded and rightly deserved.
JOHN GILROY
