Cal Bach Explores Vespers Music by Rovetta

Last night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the California Bach Society (Cal Bach) continued its 50th Anniversary season with a program entitled Venetian Vespers. During the seventeenth century St Mark’s Basilica was one of the most significant venues of sacred music. This was the period during which Claudio Monteverdi served as maestro di cappella, one of his major achievements being the composition of the Vespro della Beata Vergine (vespers of the Blessed Virgin).

Rather than undertake a presentation of this composition of epic proportion, Cal Bach Artistic Director Paul Flight chose, instead, to focus on Monteverdi’s successor, Giovanni Rovetta, presenting four of his settings of Vespers texts: “Dixit Dominus,” “Confitebor tibi,” “Lauda Jerusalem,” and “Laudate pueri Dominium.” Monteverdi himself was represented by a “Beatus vir” setting; and the program concluded with a Magnificat setting by Rovetta’s successor, Francesco Cavalli. (Those familiar with that name are more likely to associate it with his keen gift for creating ribald operas for the Venetian Carnival.)

There is a tendency to treat the Monteverdi Vespro as a work of major spectacle, complementing the many ornate details of the Basilica. Cal Bach provided the music in a much more intimate setting, with instrumental support provided by only a handful of musicians. These included two violins (Carla Moore and Cynthia Black), two cornetti (Alexandra Opsahl and Steve Escher), cello (Rocio Lopez Sanchez), theorbo and lute (Jon Mendle), and organ (Yuko Tanaka).

The entire program lasted only about an hour and a quarter, performed without an intermission. That framework further enhanced the intimacy of the occasion. Furthermore, while the emphasis was on the choral performance, “Lauda Jerusalem” was sung entirely by solo vocalists, one of whom was Flight himself. Thus, while the evening may have been modest in duration, it provided an impressively engaging diversity of intimate accounts of the efforts of three successive maestri di cappella: Monteverdi, Rovetta, and Cavalli. This modest lesson in music history could not have sounded better.