“This isn’t just a concert; it is an experience” — Toronto Consort close season with an “exalted” Monteverdi Vespers at Jeanne Lamon Hall.
Toronto Consort with David Fallis (director), Charles Daniels and Kevin Skelton (tenors), and La Rose des Vents, at Jeanne Lamon Hall. Friday, May 6.
Even though it’s a modest group both in membership and in the number of concerts it presents every year, the Toronto Consort likes to end its season with a splash. This year, the musical candidate is a sacred one: Claudio Monteverdi’s grand, 1610 setting of the Vespers. The performance on Thursday night at Jeanne Lamon Hall would have pleased the composer and Italians of the day as much as it did the audience at Trinity-St Paul’s Centre.
Longtime Toronto Consort artistic director David Fallis has assembled a small-but-mighty team of familiar faces to successfully re-enact the many glories of Monteverdi’s masterpiece. The audience rose spontaneously at the end to give them a prolonged standing ovation. It wasn’t just because the singers and instrumentalists were so great — which they were; it was also because the composer and the texts he set to music take the listener on a journey where the terminus is a sense of exaltation.
The Consort’s approach uses minimal forces to make a full interpretation of the Vespers possible: 11 singers and 15-period instrumentalists, which included members of Tafelmusik and La Rose des Vents, a wind consort of recorder, cornetto and sackbut players. Performances of the Vespers, which don’t happen frequently, often use much larger forces, including a chamber choir, but Fallis’s bare-essentials approach worked beautifully, largely thanks to the quality of the interpreters.
Putting on the Vespers is not just a matter of assembling one’s favourite people on stage. These musicians have to be familiar with the singing and playing styles we believe were used in the day. There also has to be a sense of unity in ornamentation, so that the concert doesn’t sound like a strange patchwork of approaches. Fallis & co. succeeded on all counts, presenting a performance that was unified and, best of all, beautifully balanced.
It’s much like Monteverdi’s own work. He used the Vespers as a showcase for his compositional craft. As such, it is like diorama of every musical trick available at the start of the 17th-century. We go from plainchant to highly complex counterpoint and then back again. Monteverdi’s own signature musical trick pops up in the settings of the canticles, where he builds elaborate garlands of sound around a cantus firmus, usually the reciting note in a Psalm or canticle.
Fallis added period antiphons in several instances, to provide the audience with more of what a listener might have heard in a church at the time. Peculiar to that time and place, the plainchant antiphons are sung slowly and metrically, unlike the more free-flowing chanting we are used to hearing today.
If I have one quibble with Thursday night’s performance, it seemed a bit slow in general, but it gave this listener all the more opportunity to savour the complexities of the music.
Given that the Vespers of 1610 were probably a sort of portfolio-building exercise for a composer stuck in the Mantuan court — like J.S. Bach writing the Brandenburg Concertos in a bid to escape Cöthen — there is something to be said for celebrating creative types in need of career advancement.
Fallis and the extended Toronto Consort have given us a ravishing taste of Monteverdi’s musical ambitions, which represent the finest Europe’s early 17th-century has to offer us, musically. This isn’t just a concert; it is an experience.
Performances continue to Sunday afternoon.
#LUDWIGVAN
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