Monteverdi and More
Crichton Collegiate Church 14/9/25
Concerto Italiano, director Rinaldo Alessandrini
What a difference a day makes! Last night, I was captivated by the animated Maxwell Quartet in Whitekirk as they showed tremendous enthusiasm for performing, their warm smiles and clear enjoyment of what they were playing communicating directly to an audience which in turn reciprocated that feeling of delight in their applause. Today, in the beautiful surroundings of Crichton Collegiate Church, Concerto Italiano, although playing superbly, looked as if they would much rather be somewhere else on a grey afternoon in autumnal Scotland. Two sopranos, a chitarrone and a harpsichord were employed in a luscious recital of music by Monteverdi and some of his contemporaries. The intertwining soprano voices of Monica Piccinini and Sonia Tedla were employed to sing some of the most scrumptious and seductive music possible, accompanied by the chitarrone player, Francesco Tomasi, and the director and founder of Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini.
If one closed one’s eyes, the performance was lovely, the two soprano voices different enough in tone but also near enough in timbre to allow the delicious harmonies and dissonances of the music to reveal themselves. Yet, if one looked up, their expressionless singing created a barrier between performers and audience. Much of the music was about love, its passion, its trials, its moments of ecstasy and its desperate longings. We heard about kissing – “Oh sweet enticing, oh adored kisses, souls unite to meet upon lips”; about eyes – “O fair eyes, to arms to arms! I am preparing my bosom as your target”; about lost love – “Have mercy, my life, and so that I do not die without a heart, with your love, give me your heart again” and about unrequited love – “Oh how gentle you are, dear little bird, how my being in love resembles your state. But there is a difference, it is worth your while to be a songster, you live singing, but I die singing!”
The texts dripped with passion but there was little to see in the faces of the singers. Both were completely copy-bound, and offered little by way of communication, which was a great shame, as their voices were perfect for the music. It’s ironic that in my review of the Monteverdi Vespers last Sunday, I suggested, in my general warm appreciation of I Fagiolini, that they could have been braver and more Italian in their enunciation, and yet here in Crichton Collegiate Church, I was desperate for a real Italian group to be more effusive!
It was good though, to hear the two singers using their own language so clearly. Their diction was excellent, not always something you can say about sopranos, and their musical dialogues were impeccable. Rinaldo Alessandrini, who founded Concerto Italiano in 1984, was the most animated performer, his forthright harpsichord playing providing the bedrock upon which the voices twirled and spiralled above. Amongst all the duets, the singers were able to express themselves in several solo songs, and here their virtuosity was most noticeable. Two solos each by Monteverdi and the extraordinary Barbara Strozzi demonstrated fully the complicated nature of the writing for solo voice, and the two singers dealt easily with the florid lines and the ornamentation around those lines that make this music so approachable. Strozzi was an amazing figure, a woman who, as the daughter of poet and librettist, Giulio Strozzi, had direct access to some of the finest composers living in Venice at the time, and was able to get her music published. We heard two solos and two duets which showed a talent for composition of the highest standard.
Francesco Tomasi played two chitarrone pieces to give the singers a break, but sadly, he too seemed uninvolved with the audience, and the music didn’t take flight.
The last work in the programme was a later offering, a duet, ‘Due cuori a me fan Guerra’, by Antonio Lotti, who, a hundred years after Monteverdi, continued the tradition of high voice duets that Monteverdi had perfected all those years before. Operatic flourishes and colourful vocal surprises were to the fore in this tale of lost love.
The audience gave Concerto Italiano warm applause, and, apart from the lack of expression, the performance was musically fine. As an encore, the four musicians performed the exquisite final duet from ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’ by Monteverdi, the sensuous and indeed voluptuous love duet between Nero and Poppea, the two voices meeting together, as the two lovers, the emperor and his mistress, regardless of the rules of society, declare their everlasting love for each other.
