Except for Handel’s “Messiah,” and perhaps Bach’s “Christmas
Oratorio,” baroque music and Christmas may not go together in most audiences’
minds. The truth is that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vocal and
instrumental works dedicated to the Christmas season by hundreds of 17th and 18th
century composers. Publick Musick’s
first concert of its 2017-18 season, “Rejoice!,”
revealed some imaginative and indeed joyful baroque Christmas music.
Last night’s concert took place at Lutheran Church of the
Incarnate Word, but “Rejoice!” will be repeated Saturday at 7:30
p.m. at Pittsford’s St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. If you missed the first
performance, the second is worth hearing. You’ll even have the opportunity to
learn and sing a traditional Italian Christmas song.
The composers, all Italian, ranged from the relatively
well-known Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti
to such seldom-encountered but sonorous names as Bernardo Pasquini,
Tarquinio Merula, Francesco
Durante, and (most sonorous of all) Giovanni Battista Mazzaferrata.
Their collective careers stretched through the entire 17th century and
well into the 18th, and Publick Musick’s
program attested to their skill in writing cantatas and appealing instrumental
music.
The vocal works were delightfully sung by soprano Ekaterina Gorlova, whose bright, clear voice and unaffected manner of
expression suited them perfectly. (She also sang the music’s virtuosic
coloratura lines with great precision.) The most familiar was probably Scarlatti’s
“Cantata pastorale per la nascita
di Nostro Signore,” but she was equally persuasive in
the opening number, Pasquini’s “S’apriro
di cieli” (“The heavens opened”), which was
definitely not familiar — this concert was apparently its first performance in
Rochester. Pasquini sets an unusually dense and
poetic devotional text with great attention to detail and a powerful flow of
emotion. It is a worthy discovery that makes one wonder about Pasquini’s other music. (Like all these Italian masters, he
wrote a lot, and it was celebrated in his day, if hardly known in ours.)
Of the two works by Merula, the “Cantate iubilate” is a vocally
virtuosic setting of a conventional “Alleluia” text, but his “Canzonetta spirituale sopra alla nanna” was also a
memorable discovery. It is a sort of morbid lullaby, in which Mary sings Jesus
to sleep while having visions of the punishments the future holds for her son.
The text is remarkable and the musical setting even
more so: the vocal line starts simply and grows more and more dramatic,
underpinned by an unchanging two-note pattern on the lute. Not your typical
Christmas fare, perhaps, but as performed by Gorlova
and theorbist Deborah Fox it cast a stark and
compelling spell.
These rewarding vocal works were interspersed with sonatas
and a “concerto” (basically an early string quartet, by Francesco Durante).
Perhaps the most engaging of these pieces was the brief Scarlatti Sonata in D
Minor, which featured cellist Christopher Haritatos.
He dispatched the flashy writing in the sonata’s central Allegro impressively,
and obviously enjoyed the chance to play something besides bass continuo lines.
The refined, detailed playing of the members of Publick Musick — which also included violinists Boel Gidholm and Mary Riccardi, and Aika Ito, baroque
violist — demonstrated not only the delights of this rare repertoire, but also
their skill at putting them across.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2017.
