The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: There was so much to like about the Grand Tour finale of the 2019 Madison Early Music Festival. But where were the high notes in Allegri’s legendary “Miserere”?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Fair is fair.
Before he talks about last Saturday night’s conclusion of the successful 2019 Madison Early Music Festival – which marked its 20th anniversary — The Ear has a confession to make: He generally prefers later Baroque music and he generally prefers instrumental music to vocal or choral music.
That said, he nonetheless had a memorable and very enjoyable time on the “Grand Tour” during the well-attended All-Festival concert. There was so much to like and to admire.
The concert used the conceit of a Grand Tour by a composite 17th-century traveler going to London, Venice, Rome, Naples, Paris and Dresden to take in the local sights and local music, and included lesser-known composers such as William Lawes and William Child as well as such famous figures as Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Gabrieli , Jean-Baptiste Lullyand Heinrich Schütz.
Like most journeys, this one – once again assembled in an ingenious scissors-and-paste job by early music specialist Grant Herreid (below) – had many entertaining and uplifting moments.
But it also had one big disappointment.
The Ear really looked forward to hearing a live performance of the famous “Miserere” by Gregorio Allegri (below) as a high point. But those haunting, ultra-high descant notes that give you goosebumps and that you never forget hearing just never materialized.
Maybe it had to do with the different ornamentation that the MEMF forces used. Maybe it was based on a different manuscript or score. Maybe there was no one capable of singing those spellbinding and unforgettable high notes.
Whatever the reason, The Ear’s hope for a live performance of the dramatic and iconic work were dashed and the famous, even classic, recorded versions – the 1980 recording by the Tallis Scholars is heard in the YouTube video at the bottom — remain for him the unsurpassed standard.
The evening also had its ironies. That same night on the NBC TV news The Ear saw a story about “overtourism” in Europe and China. Venice, for example, has now shrunk to only about 50,000 unhappy residents who put up with some 20 million tourists a year.
But centuries ago, travel was a rare and exotic luxury of the wealthy and well-educated, not an affordable indulgence or curiosity by ever-expanding middle classes. And this metaphorical trip proved an ideal vehicle to sample 16th- and 17th-century music in England, France, Germany and Italy.
Combining high culture and low, Herreid chose witty and detailed travelogue texts that gave the audience the rich flavor of various cultures at the time.
Details mattered to the four sharp-eyed travelers on which this tour was based. So as “our hero” wandered, we got to hear about the “libidinous ladies” of Naples and the musical talented courtesans of Venice as well as the richly attired archbishop of Paris attending a feast day service in the newly finished Notre-Dame cathedral.
Such descriptions were well delivered by unnamed narrators (below) from the chorus and proved a refreshingly earthy and entertaining counterpoint to the more serious spiritual and religious music of the era.
Another big satisfaction was the exceptional quality of the ensemble playing – exhibited even in large amounts of less interesting music — by the many singers and instrumentalists on the stage of Mills Hall, and, at one point, in the hall’s balcony.
Whether the players and singers were conducted by Herreid or by assistant conductor Jerry Hui — a UW-Madison graduate who is now a tenured professor at UW-Stout — the music sounded tight, authentic and expressive.
As for more superficial pleasures, it is great visual fun watching such early versions of modern string, wind and percussion instruments being played — trombone-like sackbuts, oboe-like shawms, flute-like recorders and lute-like theorbos. (Below are cello-like viols.)
The players, both faculty and students, were particularly convincing on their own in the sound painting done to depict battle scenes and political upheaval. And who will ever forget the surprise of loud foot-stomping by all the performers and conductor?
Herreid was absolutely spot-on to keep the program to about 80 minutes with no intermission. It helped the audience stay in the spirit of the Grand Tour and added cohesion to the program.
The Grand Tour, in short, proved outstanding in concept and excellent in execution.
But was The Ear alone in missing to those high notes?
Tags: #All-FestivalConcert, #ArgentineanComposer, #BaroqueEra, #BaroqueMusic, #BaroqueOrnamentation, #BaroqueRecorder, #BaroqueSingingStyle, #BlogPost, #BlogPosting, #BlogReview, #ChineseTourism, #ChoralMusic, #ClassicalRecording, #ClaudioMonteverdi, #DresdenGermany, #EnsemblePlaying, #FacebookPost, #FacebookPosting, #FacultyMember, #FeastDay, #GiovanniGabrieli, #GrandTour, #GrantHerreid, #GregorioAllegri, #HeinrichSchütz, #HighCulture, #HighPoint, #InstrumentalMusic, #Jean-BaptisteLully, #JerryHui, #LivePerformance, #LondonEngland, #LowCulture, #MadisonEarlyMusicFestival, #MeadWitterSchoolofMusic, #Middle-Class, #MillsHall, #Musicfaculty, #MusicReview, #NaplesItaly, #NBCNews, #NotreDame, #NotreDamedeParis, #ParisFrance, #ReligiousMusic, #RomeItaly, #SaturdayNight, #Scissors-and-Paste, #Sharp-eyed, #SistineChapel, #SoundPainting, #TallisScholars, #TelevisionNews, #theorbomusic, #UniversityofWisconsin-Madison, #VeniceItaly, #VocalMusic, #WealthyPeople, #Well-Attended, #Well-Education, #WilliamLawes, #YouTubevideo, ago, All-Festival concert, anniversary, anonymous, archbishop, Arts, attire, audience, authentic, balcony, Baroque, Baroque music, battle, blog, capable, cathedral, Cello, centuries, century, China, choral music, chorus, classic, Classical music, Claudio Monteverdi, cohere, cohesion, Compact Disc, composer, composite, concept, Concert, conduct, conductor, confession, counterpoint, courtesan, culture, cultures, deliver, delivered, description, detail, detailed, disappointment, drama, dramatic, Dresden, Early music, earthy, England, enjoyable, ensemble, entertaining, era, Europe, evening, excellent, execution, exotic, expressive, Facebook, faculty, fair, famous, feast day, fine, finish, flavor, flute, foot, forces, forget, forward, France, fun, Germany, Giovanni Gabrieli, goosebumps, Grand Tour, Grant Herreid, Gregorio Allegri, haunting, Heinrich Schütz, high, high culture, high notes, high point, iconic, ideal, ingenious, instrumental, instrumental music, instrumentalists, interesting, intermission, ironies, irony, Italy, Jacob Stockinger, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jerry Hui, journey, ladies, lesser-known, libidinous, libido, like, link, live performance, local, London, loud, low, low culture, Lully, lute, luxury, Madison, Madison Early Music Festival, manuscript, materialize, matter, Mead Witter School of Music, MEMF, memorable, metaphorical, million, Mills Hall, Miserere, moment, Music, music review, Naples, narrator, NBC, new, news, nightly, Notre Dame, Notre Dame de Paris, Oboe, Orchestra, ornamentation, outstanding, overtourism, Paris, percussion, performer, playing, pleasurer, political, post, posting, prefer, professor, program, rare, reader, recorder, recording, refreshing, religious, religious music, resident, review, rich, Rome, sackbut, sample, satisfaction, Saturday night, scene, score, serious, service, share, shawm, short, sights, singers, Singing, Sistine Chapel, Sound, sound painting, spellbinding, spirit, spiritual, stage, standard, stomp, string, successful, superficial, surprise, tag, talented, Tallis Scholars, Television, television news, tenure, texts, theorbo, tight, time, tourism, tourists, traveler, travelogue, trip, Trombone, TV, unforgettable, unhappy, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, unknown, unnamed, unsurpassed, upheaval, uplifting, UW-Stout, Vatican, vehicle, Venice, version, Viol, Viola, Violin, vocal music, watch, wealth, wealthy, well-educated, William Lawes, Wind, Wisconsin, witty, year, YouTube
Classical music: The Middleton Community Orchestra and UW-Madison horn player Dafydd Bevil excel in a concerto by Richard Strauss and a theater suite by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Plus, the UW’s Perlman Trio performs Saturday afternoon
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ALERT: On SATURDAY – (not today as first mistakenly listed) –at 3:30 p.m. in Morphy Recital Hall, the annual FREE concert by the UW’s Perlman Trio — named after benefactor Kato Perlman — will perform piano trios by Franz Joseph Haydn and Robert Schumann, and a piano quartet by Johannes Brahms. A reception will follow For more information about the student performers and the full program, go to: https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/the-perlman-trio/
By Jacob Stockinger
Here is a special posting, a review written by frequent guest critic and writer for this blog, John W. Barker. Barker (below) is an emeritus professor of Medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a well-known classical music critic who writes for Isthmus and the American Record Guide, and who hosts an early music show once a month on Sunday morning on WORT FM 89.9 FM. For years, he served on the Board of Advisors for the Madison Early Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison. Barker also took the performance photos.
By John W. Barker
The Middleton Community Orchestra (below), under conductor Kyle Knox, brought off a splendid concert on last Wednesday evening.
The opening item was the Introduction and Allegro, Op. 47, for string quartet and string orchestra by Edward Elgar. This is a broad work of great Romantic sweep, featuring the lush textures pitting a large ensemble against a miniature one.
The largely amateur Middleton orchestra fields a very large string section. It has not yet completely fused into a suave entity, but the 30-odd players did a brave job of capturing the music’s rhetorical richness.
The soloist for the evening was Dafydd Bevil (below), a French horn player who is very active in a number of orchestras and ensembles in the Madison area while currently engaged in doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music.
Bevil boldly chose as his vehicle the second of Richard Strauss’ two horn concertos. Neither is heard in concert very much, though the Concerto No. 1 is a little more familiar from recordings. That is a bravura piece, composed in 1882, when Strauss (below) was 18, and was written for his father, Germany’s foremost horn virtuoso.
The Concerto No. 2 dates from the other end of Strauss’s career, in 1942, the first of some wind concertos undertaken during and after World War II. Intended to recapture his earlier instrumental style, it is a much more studied piece than its predecessor.
Bevil, clearly a player of exceptional skill and musicality, powerfully met Strauss’ showy and florid solo writing. This is a virtuoso musician with a promising future.
The remainder of the concert was devoted to the first of what would be a number of scores Ralph Vaughan Williams (below) prepared to fit Classical Greek plays. (RVW was himself a very accomplished master of ancient Greek.)
In 1912, inspired by the translations of Gilbert Murray, he produced music to set Murray’s English texts for three of the plays by Euripides: The Bacchae, Electra, and Iphigenia in Tauris.
Before that, however, in 1909, still early in his career, Vaughan Williams composed incidental music to a production (in Greek) of the comedy by Aristophanes, The Wasps.
From that Aristophanic score, the composer put together an orchestral concert suite of an overture and five incidental numbers. The overture itself has enjoyed some frequency of concert performances, but the full suite is little known to the public over here.
It was a clever stroke of programming that Kyle Knox (below) led the orchestra in the full suite. This is delightful music, full of typical Vaughan Williams whimsy, inventiveness, and cleverness. Sounding simple, it creates balances and details not easy to manage, but Knox and the orchestra performed it with dazzling flair. (You can hear the rarely performed full suite in the YouTube video at the bottom)
This is exactly the kind of enterprise that makes the Madison area’s musical life so stimulating and joyous.
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Classical music: Despite overly traditional staging, the Madison Opera’s “Carmen” beguiled and bewitched through the outstanding singing
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Opera Guy attended Sunday’s sold-out performance of “Carmen” by the Madison Opera and filed the following review, with photos by James Gill:
By Larry Wells
When I learned that Madison Opera was going to produce Bizet‘s “Carmen,” I was not surprised. It is annually one of the most frequently performed operas internationally, and it is a surefire vehicle for filling seats. It is safe.
On the other hand, once one watches repeated performances of an old favorite, the appeal can diminish. One advantage of an opera is that novel approaches to the production can prevent a warhorse from becoming stale.
I would love to say that the approach both musically and dramatically to this production of “Carmen” broke new ground, but it did not. In fact, the production was as traditional as could be. (Below is the main set, rented from the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.)
I attended a performance of “Carmen” in Tucson a couple of years ago, and the conductor Keitaro Harada breathed new life into the familiar music through interesting tempi and finely nuanced dynamics.
Maestro John DeMain (below, in a photo by Prasad) conducted the Madison Symphony Orchestra in a perfectly fine and occasionally uplifting manner, but there was little new to learn from his approach. The purely instrumental entr’actes shimmered, but during the rest of the opera the singing was at the forefront.
Maestro Harada (below), whom Madison should be actively courting, is currently conducting “Carmen” in Sofia, and the accompanying publicity clip in the YouTube video at the bottom (bear with the Bulgarian commentary) shows that the production is unconventional in its approach although it clearly is still “Carmen.” I would have enjoyed something other than the ultra-traditional staging and sets experienced here in Madison.
At times the production was so hackneyed and hokey that I chuckled to myself – ersatz flamenco dancing, the fluttering of fans, all of the cigarette factory girls with cigarettes dangling from their lips, unconvincing fight scenes, annoying children running across the stage, dreary costumes that hardly reminded me of Seville. And I could go on.
Yet “Carmen” has a way of drawing one in despite oneself. The music is marvelous, and the singing was uniformly excellent.
The four principals were luminous both in their solo pieces and ensembles. Cecelia Violetta López as Micaëla (below right) was lustrous in her two arias as well as in her duet with Sean Panikkar’s Don José (below left).
Panikkar started the performance off with little flair, but from the time he became besotted with Carmen toward the end of the first act he was on fire. He then maintained a high degree of passion and zest in his vocal performance.
Corey Crider (below right) was a wonderful Escamillo, singing his toréador role with great élan despite his unfortunate costumes.
And Aleks Romano (below) as Carmen made the most of her complex character. Her singing was luscious, and her acting – particularly her use of her expressive eyes – was terrific.
Likewise, the lesser roles – Thomas Forde as Zuniga, Benjamin Liupaogo as Remendado, Erik Earl Larson as Dancaïre, a radiant Anna Polum as Fransquita, and Megan Le Romero as Mercédès – were equally well sung. The ensemble work in the quintet at the end of Act II and in the card scene was outstanding.
The chorus (below) sounded terrific throughout, although the women’s costumes and the stage direction made the choristers appear ludicrous as times.
When all is said and done, “Carmen” still beguiled me by drawing me into its characters’ complex psychologies and motivations. Likewise, its music still bewitched me in much the same way as Carmen inexplicably bewitched hapless Don José (below).
But I seem to always wish for more – more compelling productions, more daring music making, more risk-taking.
I do look forward to this coming spring’s production of “Florencia en el Amazonas.” The recording is captivating, and the opera’s performances have pleased a wide variety of audiences by all accounts. And it is something new. Hallelujah!
Did you go to “Carmen”?
What did you think?
The Ear wants to hear.
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