This afternoon I watched the second for the four live-streamed videos that are being presented as the first-ever virtual festival presented by the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC). The video content was captured in June of 2018 at that summer’s Berkeley Festival & Exhibition. The program consisted of a performance in its entirety of Henry Purcell’s three-act opera Dido and Aeneas. SFGC was accompanied by the strings of Voices of Music (VoM), conducted by Hanneke van Proosdij. Several cameras were used to capture the performance; and the “final cut” was compiled and edited by David Tayler. Now that the live streaming has completed, the video itself is still available for viewing on a YouTube Web page maintained by VoM. This Web page includes notes summarizing the Dramatis Personae and all participating VoM and SFGC performers. Those in the latter category are members of the SFGC Premier Ensemble.
Readers may recall that, a week ago, I expressed some discontent with the absence of subtitles for the Chordless performance of “The Night in Silence Under Many a Star,” composed by George Crumb. My issue was that Crumb was so focused on sonorities that one could not readily make out the words without the assistance of a text sheet or any reasonable facsimile (like subtitles on a film). I should therefore observe that the Dido and Aeneas video also lacks subtitles. However, familiarity with the plot and/or the libretto (whose PDF file can share the screen with the YouTube window) would probably be more than sufficient for any attentive listener to negotiate the words being sung, such was the clarity of the SFGC vocalists and the soloists performing the leading roles.
Mindy Ella Chu singing Dido’s lament from Dido and Aeneas (screen shot from the video being discussed)
The entire duration of the video is about 55 minutes. Proosdij’s conducting allowed the plot to advance at a fair clip. The tempo for the concluding lament sung by Dido carried just the necessary amount of rhetorical grief without ever dragging in pace, while the comic scenes of the witches and the sailors were dutifully energetic. The fact is that those familiar with this opera could easily dispense with specifics about the text and simply enjoy the richness of the character portrayals.
As Taylor observed in his program note, “no performing score of the opera survives from the time of Purcell.” As might be guessed, later sources set the choral passages for the standard SATB vocal levels. For this performance VoM provided its own rearrangement of those parts for SSAA resources.
My only discontent can be attributed to SFGC preparation. SFGC members are given extensive musicianship training supervised by Director of Voice Studies Justin Montigne. However, I would guess that most, if not all, of that training is oriented around singing with the accompaniment of an equal-tempered piano. This was probably not the tuning system that Purcell would have had in mind. For the most part, this was not a critical issue; but, during the very first scene, the keen ear probably would have picked up a few moments in which Belinda’s intervals were not quite on the mark. The good news is that, as the opera progressed, her sense of intonation became audibly more secure.
Taken as a whole, this joint project of SFGC and VoM made for a highly satisfying hour of listening and viewing.
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