Les Arts Florissants performed a concert in dialogue with an exhibition devoted to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; Sonnambula, the museum’s ensemble-in-residence, collaborated with singer Davóne Tines to reconstruct a 1605 court entertainment.
By
Heidi Waleson
Singers of Les Arts Florissants. CHRIS SUNWOO/THE FRICK COLLECTION
New York
The Oct. 26 “Music at the Frick” concert by Les Arts Florissants, designed to be in dialogue with the collection’s current special exhibition, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures From the Terra Sancta Museum,” did just that. The church, in Jerusalem, was originally built in the fourth century on what is purported to be the site of Christ’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection. The exhibition encompasses more than 40 religious objects sent to it as gifts by Catholic monarchs in Europe and the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. The objects, which include richly embroidered vestments and lavishly sculpted monstrances, Eucharist thrones and sanctuary lamps made of jewel-studded precious metals, are eye-catchingly high Baroque. The music, most of it from the early 17th century, is more austere, demanding concentration and contemplation.
Paul Agnew, who directed and sang tenor in the six-voice ensemble, constructed the hour-long program as a meditation on the origin of the Holy Sepulcher. Each section—crucifixion, burial and resurrection—began with plainchant and continued with more elaborate settings of those and other sacred texts on the subjects. At the heart of the Good Friday and Holy Saturday sections were four responsories from Carlo Gesualdo’s 1611 collection for Holy Week. The word-painting in these arresting madrigal-style pieces, heightened by Gesualdo’s characteristic dissonances, is starkly immediate. Words like “cilicio” (sackcloth) jumped out of the texture; the rushing turbulence of “Vos fugam capietis” (Ye shall take flight), following the first mournful words of Jesus in Gethsemane in “Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem,” graphically depicted the cowardice of his followers. Dynamics were also crucial: When Jesus cried out on the cross in the “Tenebrae” responsory, “exclamavit” was startlingly loud; his death, “emisit spiritum,” was barely audible.
The excellent singers embraced the storytelling structure and different composers added new qualities to the same texts. Antonio Lotti’s highly dramatic “Crucifixus à 6” contrasted with Claudio Monteverdi’s much earlier version—a dark, four-part setting sung by low voices, with deep bass notes on the concluding “sepultus est” (was buried). The Resurrection section of the program was more cheerful—a “Victimae paschali laudes” motet by the Spanish composer Fernando de las Infantas was jolly, and Jacques Mauduit’s French setting of Psalm 150 (the only non-Latin number) was a positively raucous celebration, its catchy rhythms depicting all the instruments praising God. The program ended on a note of jubilation with William Byrd’s bright-toned “Resurrexi.” It was a sly addition: The nationalities of most of the program’s composers reflected the origins of the exhibition’s objects, and although Byrd was a Catholic, England’s monarchs during nearly all of the period covered by the exhibition were most definitely not.
The Nov. 2 Frick concert, “A Black Masque,” was also an intriguing musical-historical exercise. Devised by Sonnambula—the Frick’s new ensemble-in-residence, directed by viol player and scholar Elizabeth Weinfield—and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, it was a creative reconstruction of the 1605 court entertainment “The Masque of Blackness” by poet Ben Jonson, designer Inigo Jones, and composer Alfonso Ferrabosco II. The original music, apart from one song, is lost, so the performers supplemented an abridged version of the text and stage directions with pieces by other composers of the period, even ingeniously setting some of Jonson’s song lyrics to them.
The masque’s subject is problematic: Some beautiful African water nymphs—portrayed by the queen and her ladies-in-waiting in blackface—wish to travel to Britain to be made white. The text is an elaborate explanation of the nymphs’ quest, told in the voices of Oceanus (Ocean), Niger (River), and Æthiopia (Moon); there are songs and dances before the nymphs plunge into the ocean to swim to Britannia, which, they have been told, is “Ruled by a sun, that to this height doth grace it: Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corse.” The actual transformation occurs in Jonson’s subsequent masque.
The instrumental consort—three viols, two violins, harpsichord and lute/theorbo—offered an invigorating collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean hits by such contemporaneous composers as William Brade, William Lawes, John Dowland and Anthony Holborne. Elegantly played laments and dances were woven between the text sections, and sometimes skillfully repurposed as their background accompaniments. Ferrabosco’s surviving number, “Come Away, Come Away,” was a pleasantly simple tune, less sophisticated than John Coprario’s mourning song, “So Parted You,” in which the violins plaintively echoed the singer. Mr. Tines gave the texts suitably dramatic readings, but his singing voice proved heavy and overly emphatic for this Renaissance style.
It would be difficult to re-create the actual experience of the masque, given its elaborate stage setting, which called for blue-haired tritons (part human, part fish), sea monsters, and a giant shell to contain the performers, for starters. The program made the point about the racist subject without being excessively didactic; the one projection was a period drawing of a costumed lady in blackface. During the final song—Jonson’s text “Now, Dian,” deftly set to Dowland’s famous tune “Flow My Tears”—it slowly transformed into its negative image, so her face became white. It was a thought-provoking hour, offering new contextual insight into period music and art that we think we know.
AndyManshel.nyc 