Saturday, August 3, 2019

ABS Celebrates the Birth of the Concert Hall

Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), American Bach Soloists (ABS) presented its second Festival concert in its tenth annual summer Festival & Academy. The title of the program, Treasures from Lyon, might have struck many in the audience as a bit cryptic for an evening that brought together Giovanni Battista Pergolesi with George Frideric Handel. However, a thoroughly engaging essay by Beverly Wilcox in the program book quickly resolved the puzzle.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Paris may have been the center of government; but Lyon was, as Wilcox put it, “the beating heart of French trade.” Authority may have been vested solely in the nobility; but Lyon could claim “about a hundred noble families whose distinguishing characteristics were unashamed participation in commerce.” Lyon was a city in which earned wealth was beginning to emerge and take precedence over inherited wealth.

That wealth could then benefit society at large by financing institutions that would serve a wider public. Such benefit took physical form in 1724 with the construction of the very first concert hall, not only in France but probably in the world. (The Covent Garden opera house would not be built until 1732; and the Music Hall in Dublin where Handel’s HWV 56 Messiah was first performed did not open until 1741.)

The first music director of the Lyon concert hall was Nicolas-Antoine Bergiron de Briou, who also served as music librarian and copyist. Repertoire was not limited to France; and the library included the three selections performed last night. The second half of the program was devoted to two Handel canticles, both composed to celebrate the Treaty of Utrecht that concluded the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. These were settings of the Ambrosian “Te Deum” hymn (HWV 278) and Psalm 100 (HWV 279), both sung in English.

Manuscript page from Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” (taken from a copy at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from IMSLP, public domain)

The first half of the program, on the other hand, saw Bergiron in action as a scholar, as well as an administrator. Pergolesi composed his setting of the “Stabat Mater” sequence in the weeks preceding his death from tuberculosis in 1736. (He was 26 years old at the time.) Scored for soprano and alto soloists accompanied only by strings and continuo, the music achieved great popularity; and, with its reduced scale, it could be performed in just about any church setting. (Unless I am mistaken, Voices of Music has played this piece with single performers for the two violin and viola parts.)

The Lyon concert hall, on the other hand, provided a much larger setting for a “ticket-buying” audience that would cover the financing of performances. The first half of last night’s program was based on Wilcox’s reconstruction of a version of Pergolesi’s score suitable for the Lyon space. This included the addition of a chorus performing with a larger ensemble of strings and continuo. The solo parts were revised for soprano (Mary Wilson) and baritone (William Sharp). (This was not the only effort to “scale up” Pergolesi’s score. The Kathleen Ferrier recording of this piece used a 1927 edition by Charles Kennedy Scott, scored for string orchestra, a women’s chorus, and soprano and contralto soloists.)

Last night’s performances were well suited to the SFCM Concert Hall space. Pergolesi’s music is particularly compelling for its polyphony. (As I have previously observed, the trochaic tetrameter of the text, the same metric structure that is found in the “Dies Irae” sequence, lends itself to tedium; but Pergolesi knew exactly how to “remodel” that tedium into a far more absorbing contrapuntal fabric. Note, for the example, the use of dissonant suspensions in the opening measures in the above illustration.) As a result, the interplay of individual lines among the soloists and the sections of the chorus readily draw the listener into rapt attention, even if the words themselves are a bit hard to take. One might say that Pergolesi’s skill at evoking character traits in his operas translated successfully into the “character” nature of the vocal lines.

The Handel canticles, on the other hand, were far more festive. Here, again, polyphony ruled the performance, with diverse instrumental lines weaving their respective paths among those of both solo and choral vocal writing. For this performance all of the vocal solos (and there were many of them) were distributed among American Bach Choir members. (Sadly, I was not well-enough equipped to account for who was singing what.) Both canticles were clearly written as celebratory compositions, and the rhetoric of celebration made for a thoroughly engaging second half of the program.

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