Adelaide Reviews

There is no doubt that the three programs presented by the Ensemble Pygmalion were the sensation of this year’s Adelaide Festival. After the first program, Jansson Antmann, writing for Limelight, compared it to a ‘Once in a lifetime experience’. I don’t find this an exaggeration. The first half of the Monteverdi Vespers concert was by some distance the best performance of this work that I have ever heard. And to rivet the audience’s attention through over two hours of music by Luigi Rossi, who though no slouch as a composer, does not have the harmonic vocabulary of either Monteverdi or the German baroque composers, was a remarkable feat.

Ensemble Pygmalion was founded 20 years ago by Raffaele Pichon, who is still their conductor and artistic director. It is remarkable among early music groups, as it comprises both choir and orchestra, unlike, for example John Elliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir, or Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s instrumental ensemble Concentus Musicus. The understanding and mutual admiration for each other generated by choir and instrumentalists constantly working together was clear in all three shows, as excited smiles flashed between various members of the ensemble, choir and orchestra alike.

Bach: Goodnight world

The first concert was in itself a tour de force, comprising as it did an entire program of German baroque music, all except one in minor keys, and mostly slow. (Though it is true that slow music is the best Baroque music – fast music of that era seems to me always a bit superficial, even Monteverdi’s Stile concitato or J S Bach’s instrumental allegros.) The concert included music by Johann Christoph Bach and Johann Michael Bach, as well as the Bach we all know and love. It was Pichon’s first appearance in Australia, and the audience held its collective breath at his superbly crafted cadences, his completely convincing paragraphing of the music, and his control of timbre. The choir of ten singers perfectly balanced the instrumental group, with its large continuo section comprising keyboards, a theorbo, two gambas, a cello, a violone, and a bassoon.

The concert’s theme was German Protestant music written in the shadow of the Thirty Years War, and much of was about the difficulties of living, and the release that death afforded. It began with an aria by Adam Drese, Nun ist alles überwunden, exquisitely sung by soprano Julie Roset, (Roset teamed up with fellow soprano Marilys de Villoutreys in the magical Pulchra es duet in the Vespers, and in Rossi’s Orfeo Roset displayed the full emotional gamut of her warm lyrical voice in the character of Euridice.)

The Drese aria was followed by choral canon by Daniel Speer, and a long choral motet by Buxtehude, Jesus, meines Lebens Leben. While this is perhaps not one of the composer’s greatest works, it gave Pichon an opportunity to show how he can bring even a slightly moribund score to life with sudden contrasts of dynamic, and his beautiful, perfectly in tune, soft cadences. 

After an instrumental piece by Johann Michael Bach, into which the violinist Sophie Gent poured all her passion, the tenor Lawrence Kilsby sang an aria by Philipp Erlebach, Himmel, du weisst meine Plagen. (No, I hadn’t heard of Erlebach, or Drese, or Speer, before this concert). Kilsby is an amazing phenomenon. In the Vespers he sang Nigra sum, which is written in Monteverdi’s favourite range for tenor, quite low by modern standards, and it was deeply seductive. Then later in that concert, in the Magnificat, he sang in the highest haut-contre range, frequently cadencing on high B. He never sounds forced, always fluid enough to phrase perfectly and give the texts their full meaning.

The Bach concert continued with beautiful solos from countertenor William Shelton, soprano Perrine Devilliers, and a duet by the two basses Tomás Král and Renaud Brès. The soloists all came from the choir, as was the case in the Vespers, and merged seamlessly back into the choir after their solos. This gave rise to much movement on the stage, always managed with graceful stagecraft.

The concert concluded with three works by J S Bach. It was an interesting experience, one that I am sure was shared by many in the audience, to hear three very familiar works after so much unfamiliar music. Lobet den Herrn, the only work in a major key in the entire concert, was delivered with great panache and verve. Then came Bach’s longest motet, Jesu, meine Freude. Pichon varied the textures of this 11-movement piece by having the two trios sung by solo voices, and by using a great range of dynamics and continuo structures. Further, it became clear just how much Pichon played around with tempi in order to bring the full expressive potential from the music. I found this wholly convincing in the more dramatic choruses which separate the verses of the chorale, but personally I prefer the chorales themselves, which act as pillars in the structure of the whole motet, to be somewhat less flexible in tempo, as if they were sung by a whole congregation.

The instrumental playing throughout was of the highest order. Particularly engaging was Sophie Gent’s amazingly expressive violin playing, and Thibaut Roussel’s thoughtful and contrapuntal theorbo continuo.

Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610

The first half of Pygmalion’s performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers was quite simply the best I have ever heard. Pichon understands the prodigious architecture of the work, and paced the alternation of psalms and concerti perfectly, allowing a couple of phrases of unaccompanied plainsong to give from time to time some respite from Monteverdi’s fantastically intense music. The instrumental ensemble added to that for Bach: Good Night World two cornetti and three sackbuts, which are specifically called for by Monteverdi in the second half of the Vespers, as well as a third gamba, a second theorbo and a harp. Their sound, whether as obbligato instruments or in tuttis, was clear, well-differentiated, and full without any sense of strain. The choir was also larger than for the Bach concert, and sounded powerful enough to fill the venue, St Peter’s Cathedral, but never so loud as to obscure the intricate part-writing of the psalms. One of them, Nisi Dominus, is scored for double choir, each choir having 5 parts, and you could hear everything.

The soloists who sang the concerti were simply as good as it gets. The amazing Lawrence Kilsby not only sang Nigra Sum, but was the principal tenor in the echo aria, Audi Coelum, and first tenor in Duo Seraphim. For the latter he was joined by Samuel Boden, and then when a third joins them, it was none other than  the versatile Tomás Král, a bass perfectly happy singing tenor. Duo Seraphim was the highlight of highlights, the chain of suspensions near the start cascading down with such sweetness that you never wanted it to stop.

Audi Coelum prompts me to comment on Pichon’s capacity always to use the space the ensemble performs in to greatest advantage. It is easy to place the second tenor in Audi Coelum at the opposite end of the hall from the first tenor. But in many other pieces, both in the Vespers and in the Bach concert, groups of singers would separate from the choir and sing from the back of the building, or from the sides of the audience. Since everyone knows that the Vespers was written with the acoustic of St Mark’s in Venice in mind, some distant positioning of occasional forces is expected. For the hymn Ave Maris Stella Pichon took the whole choir to the back and sides of the cathedral. This 7-verse hymn is a moment of respite between the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria and the Magnificat, and, because the music is less exciting than the rest of the Vespers, is often a piece the audience might wish was over quickly. Pichon’s handling, not just spatially but also timbrally, scoring each of the 7 verses for different combinations of voices, redeemed this section or the work where, one might be forgiven for saying, Homer momentarily nods.

This performance used a different, longer version of the Vespers than the version I know. Besides the little antiphons separating the concerti from the psalms, there were two Sonatas sopra sancta Maria, not just one, and a conclusion, in which new words were set to the opening versiculum. This was interesting, especially the unfamiliar Sonata, which nonetheless does not show off the remarkably varied orchestra in the way the more familiar version does. I would have liked an explanation in the program for Pichon’s choice here.

I would also have liked a discussion of Pichon’s decision not to transpose the final psalm and the whole of the Magnificat down so as to match the tessitura of most of the first half. I thought it was now fairly well accepted that the cleffing of these pieces indicated a different pitch standard than the cleffing of the first half of the piece. Not transposing means that everything is now a fourth higher than the earlier part of the Vespers - instead of going up to E, the sopranos and tenors go up to A, for example. As I have mentioned, this high pitch gave the incredible tenor Kilsby several cadences on high B in the Gloria  of the Magnificat. Further, the cornetti, playing in a reasonable range for the Sonata, are now expected to reach heights which confound many excellent players (though not Emmanuel Mure or Lambert Colson, who negotiated the passages in the Magnificat with seeming ease). Yes, the higher pitch creates a certain increase in excitement, but to my ears it sounded incongruous. Besides, we didn’t need more excitement - the performance was riveting from start to finish, and would have been so at pitch where the first half matched the second.

However, this performance was so good as to be almost magical, and when Raphaël Pichon stepped onto the stage at the beginning of the next concert, Orfeo, the reception he received from the public, who had already seen the Vespers and the Bach concert, was quite extraordinary.

Rossi: Orfeo

Luigi Rossi’s opera Orfeo was first performed in Paris in 1647. It was composed only a few years after Monteverdi’s last two operas, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea. Opera in Italy already had a history of almost 50 years, but this was the first taste that Parisians had experienced. The story of Orpheus descending into Hades to retrieve his bride Euridice, who had been killed by snakebite on their wedding day, was one of the most frequently transposed into opera in the Baroque period; the very first operas, in 1600, were based on this story, and as late as 1752 Gluck chose this story for the first of his ‘Reform’ operas. The attraction of the story for musicians was, of course, that Orpheus’ power is that of music itself. He plays the lute so well that his playing enchants anyone who heard it, including the furies whose duty it is to stop living humans entering Hades.

The story is redacted differently in the many operas based upon it. In some, Amor or Venus, divine avatars of love, restores Euridice to Orpheus, even though Orpheus breaks the condition imposed upon him by Pluto when he allows Euridice to return to the world of the living. In others, including Rossi’s opera, Orpheus turning round to look at Euridice before they emerge from the underworld is fatal for Euridice. Another trope in Rossi’s work is the figure of Euridice’s father, sung here most touchingly by Tomás Král, who is as heartbroken as Orfeo when Euridice dies.

For the Adelaide Festival the performance of Orfeo in the Town Hall was not staged, though many of the singers could hardly have acted better if it had been. Yet while the singers inhabited their roles well, the absence of a director somewhat reduced the sense of dramatic coherence. Yet, despite that, attention never flagged.

The orchestra for Pygmalion’s performance was essentially the same as the band who played for the Vespers, but included no fewer than four gambas. These played the accompaniment of the exquisite lament for Euridice’s death, which was one of the high points of the score. It has to be said that Rossi did not have the vast musical vocabulary of Monteverdi, and one could have tired of the endless cadences, were it not for the truly exquisite handling of these by Raphaël Pichon. He has the ability to craft phrases with one finger of his hand, and he conducts everything as if his life depended on it.

Many of the characters were played by singers we had admired in the two previous shows. I have already mentioned Julie Roset’s delightful characterisation of Euridice. William Shelton gave a slightly comic but nonetheless moving performance as Euridice’s Nurse; the jealous but largely self-pitying Aristaeus showed the strength and steel of Blandine de Sensal’s mezzo; and Lawrence Kilsby was golden as ever as Apollo.

Rossi’s opera has two almost entirely comic characters. Momo, the god of mockery, was sung by Samuel Boden, who almost stole the show with his wit and buffoonery. In this version of the story, Venus disguises herself as an old woman, trying to entice Euridice to have a fling with Aristaeus, the implication being that while Euridice is deeply in love with Orfeo, the feeling may be only partially returned. Camille Chopin sang Venus in her beautiful young form, and Dominique Visse, with great comic flair, sang Venus disguised. I particularly liked Alex Rosen’s gorgeous deep bass voice, a type of voice much beloved by Monteverdi, in the role of Pluto.

It was hard to imagine anyone upstaging these wonderful singers from Pygmalion, but the mezzo who sang the part of Orfeo did that. Xenia Puskarz Thomas was outstanding, even in the company of this masterly ensemble. Her voice is rich, commanding, clear, and one hundred percent expressive. When she was on stage, she riveted attention on herself, calmly, without exaggeration, and without a trace of diva-ish-ness. And, with the help of Pichon’s curatorial conducting, she achieved the feat of making this music sound utterly convincing.

The one drawback to this show was the surtitling. Whoever was in charge of the surtitling did not keep up with the sometimes rapid recitative, and frequently tried to back-track or race ahead to find their place. This was most disconcerting. I suspect that they did not know Italian, and I would suggest that surtitlists always ought to be conversant with the language they are surtitling from.

To conclude, Pygmalion is a force to be reckoned with. Its name perhaps implies the intention to make something first-class out of less promising material. Now, however, after 20 years, every member of the ensemble, whether singer or instrumentalist, is of the highest calibre. Australia currently has many fine early music groups, the pick of which, in my opinion, is Erin Helyard’s Pinchgut Opera. But even these can learn much from Pichon’s Ensemble Pygmalion.