Magnificat

Spanning the turn of the millenium, Magnificat’s eighth season featured a variety of styles and included a staged production of Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, choreographed performances of two Monteverdi madrigali rappresentativi and a Mass by Frescobaldi. It also included Magnificat’s first encounter with the astonishing music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani that set in motion a decade-long project of performing and recording her complete works.

There are only two singing roles in Pergolesi’s comic intermezzo a willful and beguiling servant Serpina (sung by Jennifer Ellis in Magnificat’s production) and her bumbling master Uberto (sung by David Newman), whom she  tricks into marriage. But this performance also featured Paul Del Bene in the silent role of Volpone, Uberto’s manservant, and his acrobatic hijinks contributed hilariously to the performances that the San Francisco Classical Voice described as a “refreshing blend of silliness, song, and somersaults.” The program included three instrumental works of Pergolesi: a violin concerto that featured Rob Diggins as soloist, the Sinfonia from his opera Lo frate innamorato that served as an overture and a sonata for violin with obbligato cello.

In addition to four vocal works by Carissimi, Magnificat’s November program will include three instrumental compositions by composers active in Rome during Carissimi’s lifetime: keyboard works by Michelangelo Rossi and Girolamo Frescobaldi, and a toccata for theorbo by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger. All three were among the finest virtuosi active in Rome during the first half of the 17th century and it is certain that their paths crossed with Carissimi after his arrival in 1629.

A remarkably versatile musician, Michelangelo Rossi held prominent positions as a composer, violinist, organist, and most likely also as a singer. Rossi was most famous during his lifetime as a virtuoso violinist (in pay records in Savoy he is often referred to as “Michelangelo il Violino”,) though no examples of his music for that instrument survive. Born into a musical family in Genoa, Rossi moved to Rome by 1624 and entered the service of Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, where he worked with Sigismondo d’India, whose influence on Rossi’s vocal music is striking. During this period he also encountered Frescobaldi, with whom he may have studied.

“The most excellent Iacomo Carissimi, a composer of great fame, most worthy maestro di cappella of the Church of S Apollinare of the German College for a period of many years, outshines others in originality and in case of compositional style, moving the spirits of the listeners into many moods; for his compositions are full of life and vivacity of spirit.”

Writing in 1650 in his widely circulated tome Musurgia Universalis, Athanasius Kircher was unreserved in his praise for his fellow Jesuit Iacomo Carissimi and drew on many of the master’s works to exemplify the use of music to express emotion and touch the affections of an audience. His reputation as a composer and teacher was promoted by the singers he worked with and his many students, most notably Marc-Antoine Charpentier.  Händel famously plagiarized some of Carissimi’s works and Charles Burney, writing over a century after the composer’s death, devoted more space to Carissimi in his General History of Music than to any other composer of the 17th century.

The son of a barrel-maker, Carissimi’s exact birth date is unknown, but it was probably in 1604 or 1605 in Marino, near Rome where he was baptized on April 18, 1605.  Almost nothing is known of his life before he is listed as a singer at Tivoli in 1623. Two years later he was organist there. His first appointment as maestro di cappella came in 1627 at the S. Rufino Cathedral in Assisi. The following year he was called on by Bernardino Castorio in Rome to fill the post of maestro di cappella at the German College there, a prestigious post in which Victoria and Agazzari had served earlier. Carissimi spent the rest of his life at the college and he was ordained to the priesthood in 1637. His responsibilities included training the choirs and providing liturgical music for the adjoining S. Apollinare chapel.  His official salary of 5 scudi (in 1634) probably reflects only a fraction of his actual income. In 1655-56 he was given the title maestro di cappella del concerto di camera by Christina, the Queen of Sweden in exile in Rome.

I have long wished to hear a live performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Descent d’Orphée aux enfers. Several years ago, I even transcribed portions of the composer’s manuscript from a facsimile in the UC Berkeley library. If I could have chosen any Bay Area ensemble to perform the work, it would have been Warren Stewart’s early-music ensemble, Magnificat, which assembled an ideal cast for its performance Sunday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco. I cannot imagine a more perfect rendition.

Successful performances depend on assembling the rare musicians who “get” this style. With Magnificat, tenor Aaron Sheehan sang the title role of Orpheus with an exquisite tone perfectly matched to this repertory. French Baroque music requires a sort of nuanced singing that is less oriented toward large phrases and showmanship, though I doubt that Sheehan, who sang superbly, would have any difficulty in more legato music.

New Time for Friday and Saturday Concerts – 7:30 pm

Magnificat’s 20th season opens with weekend with three performances of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers. Charpentier’s masterful setting of the Orpheus was performed once before on Magnificat’s series in 1997. Returning to the work has been a revelation for all – the subtlety of the harmonic language, the beauty of the poetry, the colorful instrumentation and the range of Charpentier’s emotion palette are on display throughout this brief masterpiece.

The program, with notes, texts and translations and bios is available for download here: PDF. Magnificat will be performing from an edition prepared by Charpentier scholar and member of our Artistic Advisory Board John Powell from the University of Tulsa. The score can be downloaded from Dr. Powell’s website.

Magnificat’s seventh season included a full-scale puppet opera, another program of music by Buxtehude, a journey to the New World, and our second production of Monteverdi’s extraordinary Vespers of 1610.

The sold-out performances of the opera parody La Grandmére amoureuse in January 1998 prompted a search for other surviving puppet operas and we quickly began preparing a performance score of Jacopo Melani’s Il Girello. Written and first performed in 1668, Il Girello featured a libretto by Filippo Acciaiuoli in 1668 and a prologue by Alessandro Scarlatti. The opera was immensely successful and saw many revivals into a performance with life-size puppets in Venice in 1682. It was an obvious choice for a follow-up collaboration with the Carter Family Marionettes.

Magnificat’s sixth season expanded on repertoire and genres that we had explored in out first five seasons and included a program of chamber cantatas by Buxtehude, a revival of Charpentier’s Nativity Pastorale, an Annunciation Vespers with music by Maurizio Cazzati and Giovanni Legrenzi and another opera pardoy – this times with puppets – and chickens!

Over the course of the season, artistic directors Susan Harvey and Warren Stewart led ensembles that included Peter Becker, Louise Carslake, Stephen and Chris Carter, Bruce Chessé, San Dalton, Rob Diggins, John Dornenburg, Jolianne von Einem, Julie Jeffrey, Jennifer Ellis, Judith Nelson, Hanneke van Proosdij, Neal Rogers, Robby Stafford, Bill Wahman, Roy Wheldon, and Randy Wong.

Stephen Smoliar posted this preview of Magnificat’s upcoming concerts at Examiner.com.

The first concert of Magnificat’s twentieth season will consist of a single composition, La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfersby Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The circumstances under which this work was composed throw an interesting light on how music was practiced in the late seventeenth century, particularly with regard to the Hôtel de Guise. This was the household of Marie de Lorraine, called Mademoiselle de Guise and a princess in rank. She chose to live in Paris away from the court of Louis XIV, and her residence was known as the Hôtel de Guise.

The group is San Francisco-based, and some of its members actually reside in that area. Its artistic director, Warren Stewart, however, now lives in Berlin. One of its two tenors, Paul Elliott, directs IU’s Early Music Institute. Its theorbo player is Nigel North, another EMI stalwart. The bunch of them get together periodically as Magnificat Baroque. And as such, they united here in recent days, six vocalists and eight instrumentalists, to prepare for a Bloomington Early Music Festival performance Saturday evening in First United Church. What a concert they gave.

They roused a large audience to cheers with generous samplings of music from Claudio Monteverdi’s Eighth (and final) Book of Madrigals, his “Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi” (“Madrigals of War and Love”). The event turned out to be a case of stunning music stunningly realized.

The Monteverdi material has been at the heart of Magnificat Baroque’s repertoire for some 20 years. One could tell. Heard was a combine of singing and playing completely natural, stylistically right, and utterly tantalizing. Director Stewart devoted the first part of the program to the songs of war, the second to those of love. They intersect in the belief espoused by Monteverdi and the poets whose words he used that war and love have a strong relationship, in that warriors return from battle to love and that lovers do battle in the conflict between the sexes.

A sampling of interpretive approach came early, in the first madrigal chosen, “Altri canti d’Amor.” As the singers gave breath to words about love (“Let others sing of Love, the tender archer’s sweet charms and sighed-for kisses”), the music seemed to be carried on soft breezes. When the words shifted to war (“Of Mars I sing, furious and fierce, the harsh clashes and the bold battles”), a storm of sound accosted the ears. Nothing heard seemed forced; music and performance supported emotion and mood.

The 18th annual Bloomington Early Music Festival (BLEMF), held Sept. 7-11, continues a tradition of collaboration with the IU Jacobs School of Music Early Music Institute, presenting renowned local and national musicians, many of whom are alumni, students and faculty. This year, the festival expands its relationship with Indiana University by linking up with the College of Arts and Sciences’ Themester 2011, “Making War, Making Peace.”

“This year’s festival, at the start rather than at the end of the school year, is offered so that a large number of the students and faculty of the Jacobs School of Music and IU will be able to attend,” said Paul Elliott, director of the Early Music Institute and chair of the early music department. “Here is a unique opportunity to sample something new, or to reacquaint yourself with music that you love but rarely get the chance to hear ‘live’.

From the Bloomington Herald-Times:

BLEMF. Yes, BLEMF, the new BLEMF, the Bloomington Early Music Festival revived and in a changed calendar slot, a period commencing Wednesday evening, just ahead of IU’s about-to-start flood of concerts. Whatever the future holds for BLEMF will, we’re told, take place not when things used to, at the end of May, but henceforth, in early September.

“This will be a watershed event for us,” says Christine Kyprianides, president of the festival’s board of directors. “Two years ago, it was apparent that we had to change direction, find new audiences, and revisit our mission. By moving the festival to a time during the academic year, we have the opportunity to profit from the immense resources of the university and to make a significant contribution in return. We’ll see if this is a successful model or not.”

… BLEMF is also entering into the spirit of IU’s Themester initiative, Making War, Making Peace, presenting the distinguished San Francisco-based Magnificat Baroque Ensemble in a program of selections taken from Book 8 of Claudio Monteverdi’s Madrigals, “Madrigals of War and Love.”

“I first heard Magnificat in South Bend several years ago,” says Kyprianides. “It was a wonderful concert, and I talked for some time afterwards with its artistic director, Warren Stewart, about all sorts of musical things. Later, when the BLEMF program committee was planning for our War and Peace program, we decided that we had to have a performance of the Monteverdi madrigals. EMI’s Paul Elliott, who is on our board, suggested asking Magnificat. Both he and Nigel are regular members of the ensemble.

Magnificat’s fifth season featured programs that explored the music of new composers (for our series) Buxtehude, Cavalli and Marazzoli, our first modern premiere, along with another masterpiece by an old favorite, Charpentier. It was a season of contrasts in nationalities and genres: a North German cantata cycle, a reconstruction of a Venetian vespers, the staged production of the first Italian opera performed in France and a very Italianate French setting of the Orpheus legend.

With the Cavalieri recording completed, Magnificat planned a new season that would keep our audiences guessing – three wildly varied programs, establishing a pattern that became a point of pride as the ensemble grew over the years. The season included a program of Carissimi oratorios and instrumental music by Frescobaldi, a Venetian Christmas Mass featuring music by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, an opera parody from the Parisian fair theater and  a return to the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition for a memorable performance of Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien.

Magnificat will perform a program of selections from Monteverdi’s Madrigals of War & Love as part of the Bloomington Early Music Festival on September 10 2011 and as part of our own series on the wekend of February 17-19 2012. Jeffrey Kurtzman and Warren Stewart contributed these program notes.

In 1638, Claudio Monteverdi, the seventy-one year-old music director of the ducal church of St. Mark’s in Venice, published his Eighth Book of Madrigals, the final collection of his secular music to be issued in his lifetime. He had last published a set of secular compositions in 1619, so the Eighth Book has a retrospective character, bringing together music written as early as 1608, and including one large work from 1624 and a variety of other compositions whose origins are unknown but which probably span the entire period 1619-1638. This unusually large collection was dedicated to Ferdinand III, the newly crowned Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna, whose mother was a member of the ducal family of the Gonazagas, former rulers of Mantua in northern Italy, where the early part of Monteverdi’s career had unfolded and to which he was still connected by various threads.

Monteverdi subtitled the Eighth Book Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi con alcuni opuscoli in genere rappresentativo (“Madrigals of war and love with some pieces in the theatrical style”), and the texts repeatedly expound the interlocking themes of love and war– the warrior as lover, the lover as warrior and the war between the sexes. The relationship between love and war had been a common Italian poetic conceit ever since the time of Petrarch in the 14^th century, and had been given additional impetus by its prominence in Torquato Tasso’s late 16^th century epic poem, Gerusalemme Liberata. The notion of lover as warrior was also central to the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino, who exerted a significant influence on Italian literature and aesthetics of the 17^th century and whose poetry was set many times by Monteverdi.

The 2010 Berkeley Festival and Exhibition is the subject of a 2 hour radio documentary that will be broadcast on KDFC-FM and over a hundred other stations nationwide this month. The program is part of America’s Music Festivals, a 26 episode series of documentaries exploring classical music festival in the United Sates, hosted by Baltimore Symphony music director Marin Allsop. The program will air on KDFC on August 27 at 9:00 pm, but is available in streaming audio now here.

The program features complete recordings of many memorable performances from a very memorable festival, including selections from main stage concerts by AVE, !Sacabuche¡, the Marion Verbruggen Trio, Music’ Recreation, ARTEK and Magnificat as well as highlights from the Festival Finale program. Jennifer Ellis Kampani sings Barbara Strozzi’s O Maria, Laura Heimes and Meg Bragle sing Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s O mi domine, and the program concludes with the complete Vivaldi Magnificat conducted by Magnificat’s artistic director Warren Stewart.

The enthusiastic response to Magnificat's production of Cavalieri's La Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo in Ferbuary 1994 led to a recording on the Koch International label. With recording sessions scheduled for the end of October, it wa decided to reduce the concert series to just two sets, but they were both extraordinary programs, each featuring monumental works from the 17th century: Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 and Heinrich Schütz's Resurrection Story. The recordings took place in the exquisitely beautiful chapel of St. Vincent's School for Boys in Marinwood. Warren Stewart served as session producer together with engineer Peter Nothnagle. The acoustics were perfect and in general there were few issues with ambient noise (always a concern with non-studio recording locations) until the third evening of sessions, when it was discovered to our surprise that the school had scheduled a "haunted house" as a fund-raiser in the rooms immediately adjacent to the ...

The most complex and sophisticated of Monteverdi’s large-scale madrigals from the Eighth Book, Hor che’l ciel e la terra sets, in two parts, the entirety of Petrarch’s 164th poem from the Canzoniere, a sonnet. The prima parte sets the two quatrains, and the seconda parte the two terzets. This is a poem replete with Petrarchan contrasts and oxymorons. But Petrarch’s contrasts, as described by Pietro Bembo in the Prose della volgar lingua, are brought into harmony and smoothed over the mellifluous sounds and varied, rolling rhythms of his highly refined poetic style. This is easily seen in Petrarch’s fifth and sixth lines, where the most abrupt semantic juxtapositions are couched in an elegantly structured and alliterative sentence that draws attention away from the contrasts toward their union in a highly stylized and carefully crafted poetic conception. Resemblances of rhyme, of rhythm, of line lengths and stanzaic structure, and especially resemblances of sonority all serve to overcome the semantic contrasts.

Magnificat’s first season of concerts was such fun, plans began immediately for a second season. This time the emphasis was on the 17th century innovations in setting dramatic narrative to music. Three programs were presented and again each program was performed in San Jose, Berkeley and San Francisco.

As he approached his eighth decade, Monteverdi set about assembling his eighth and largest collection of secular works, eventually published in 1638 as Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi… and dedicated to the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. As explained in the dedication, the collection was originally to have been dedicated to (and its publication funded by) his father, Ferdinand II, but as the elder Ferdinand passed away in 1636, the dedication passed to his heir. Along with the change in dedication, Monteverdi modified some of the texts with references to the younger monarch, whose dual occupation in the military and musical composition made him an apt dedicatee for a volume of madrigals of war and love.

It is satisfying that the composers featured in our first season: Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, Iacomo Carissimi and Marc-Antoine Charpentier and even some of the same masterpieces, notably Jephte and the Christmas Story, should also be featured in our 20th anniversary season. The genius of these composers, their innovations and the tremendous influence they had on the music of the 17th century have inspired every program on every season that Magnificat has presented since and at least one has been featured on a program in every Magnificat season. In the years since that first season it has been a privilege to get to know these composers and to share their magnificent music with the many fine musicians who have been a part of Magnificat.