Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Music

Operas and Concerts Fit for a Prince (Especially a Sun King)

BOSTON — During the nine days of the Boston Early Music Festival, which ended on Sunday afternoon, you could spend all day every day, from 9 a.m. to midnight, bingeing on the sounds of antique instruments and the music composed for them. The sheer number of performances offered in the festival and the associated Fringe Concerts let listeners build their schedules around their own passions, or ignore what they knew and seek out the unfamiliar.

You could also wing it (my own approach) and see what currents emerged. There was enough opera, for example, to constitute a small Baroque opera series. Besides its superb production of Monteverdi’s “Incoronazione di Poppea” the festival presented a double bill of one-act chamber operas, John Blow’s “Venus and Adonis” and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s “Actéon” at Jordan Hall on Saturday evening.

Both revolve around mythological hunts gone awry: Adonis, Venus’s beloved, is mortally wounded by a boar, and Actéon, transformed into a deer after stumbling across the goddess Diana and her maidens bathing, is killed by his own hounds. Gilbert Blin’s production ties the works together as operas within an opera. The frame is a 17th-century court, and the richly costumed courtiers become the characters and chorus.

Amanda Forsythe, who made a strong impression as Drusilla in “Poppea,” proved both a more supple and a more virtuosic performer in the brighter spotlight Venus afforded her. She had able partners in Jesse Blumberg, as Adonis, and Mireille Lebel, as an alluring Cupid. In the Charpentier, Aaron Sheehan and Teresa Wakim sang ably and sympathetically as the hapless Actéon and the outraged Diana.

Another Charpentier chamber opera, “Les Arts Florissants,” turned up among the Fringe events, in an elegantly staged, finely polished performance at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, featuring students from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Really more a cantata than an opera, this paean to Louis XIV and his arts patronage has courtly arias for personifications of Music, Poetry, Painting and Architecture. But the action, such as it is, is a debate between Peace (sung sweetly and with a flowing sense of line by Sara Casey) and Discord (performed with energy and character by Dominic Johnson). Peace wins.

You don’t often hear two Charpentier operas over a weekend, but a focus on the French Baroque was another of the festival’s currents. In a program devoted mostly to that repertory, the Trio Hantaï (three brothers who all play period instruments) demonstrated the niceties of both the French compositional style and its associated performance techniques.

Image
Amanda Forsythe and Jesse Blumberg in John Blow’s “Venus and Adonis,” part of the Boston Early Music Festival.Credit...Michael J. Lutch for The New York Times

Marc Hantaï’s warm, silky tone on a wooden transverse flute is in some ways this group’s signature sound, and it was at its most rounded in a suite of François Couperin dances that opened the program. That said, Jérôme Hantaï’s agile viola da gamba playing matched his brother’s flute tone in both clarity and gesture in the tandem lines of Couperin’s “Gracieusement” and in the dialogue passages of a Leclair sonata. And Pierre Hantaï’s harpsichord registration (using the lute stop in a Couperin sarabande, for example) was consistently inventive.

The Ricercar Consort, led by the gambist Philippe Pierlot, also devoted its program to French music, much of it rarely heard. Jean-Féry Rebel’s “Tombeau de Monsieur de Lully” was a highlight of its Thursday afternoon concert at Jordan Hall: you had to wonder whether the work’s zestier sections, interposed between lugubrious funereal passages, betrayed a composer’s elation that Lully’s monopolistic reign over the French musical world had come to an end.

Also appealing were several vocal works sung with a sweet tone and a Gallic flair by Céline Scheen, most notably Rameau’s pastoral cantata “Le Berger Fidèle.” And Mr. Pierlot gave a fine demonstration of the colorful French gamba style in works by Marais and DuBuisson.

Gamba music was plentiful: this revitalized instrument clearly makes a strong appeal even when Jordi Savall and Wieland Kuijken are not in the vicinity. At a late night concert at Jordan Hall on Thursday, the gambists Erin Headley and Anne-Marie Lasla celebrated 30 years of performing together, both as soloists and as continuo players in the Parisian ensemble Les Arts Florissants.

They are graceful players, and they shone in duets by De Mont and Sainte-Colombe. Ms. Headly made a strong impression on her own in a virtuosic suite by Louis Couperin. Ms. Headley and Ms. Lasla were accompanied on the organ and harpsichord by Kristian Bezuidenhout, who also performed several works, including a wide-ranging exploration of “Les Folies d’Espagne” by Marais.

Mr. Bezuidenhout’s organ accompaniments were simple — mostly chord roots to support the gambas — but they helped him achieve a keyboard trifecta on Thursday. He began the day giving sensitive accounts of Haydn sonatas and variations on the fortepiano in the opening installment of a Keyboard Mini-Festival at the First Lutheran Church. And a couple of hours before his appearance as an organist he gave a shapely, thoughtfully paced account of the harpsichord solo in Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 5, with the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble, also at Jordan Hall.

By Friday afternoon, when he joined the cellist Pieter Wispelwey for a Beethoven recital (the Opus 5 Sonatas and the Variations on “Ein Mädchen Oder Weibchen”), it was clear that Mr. Bezuidenhout was this festival’s M.V.P. The tactile timbres and careful dynamic shading of his fortepiano lines, and the unusual effects Mr. Wispelwey drew from his period cello (he was able to make low-lying phrase ends sound like distant thunder) made this one of the most magical performances of the festival.

But magic was in no short supply. Friday evening at Emmanuel Church the British a cappella ensemble Stile Antico made its American debut with a program of Renaissance settings of the Song of Songs, including a striking antiphonal setting of “Veni Dilecte Mi” by Sebastián de Vivanco and seamlessly lush works by Palestrina, Lassus and Victoria. The 13 singers produce a beautifully balanced sound and are likely to become worthy competitors for the Tallis Scholars.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT