Sunday Review: Divine Histories, a concert by the Seicento Baroque Ensemble

By Chuck Smythe

My last big concert series of the season was with the Seicento (17th Century) Baroque Ensemble, a semipro chamber chorus dedicated to early music. This is a somewhat intimidating group for an amateur. Evanne Brown, the director and proprietor, is the Kappelmeister of the downtown Methodist Church, as well as a journeyman soprano soloist.

Evanne Brown

At least three members are music professors, as are several of our regular soloists and orchestra. Roughly half are choir directors in their own right. Expectations are high...I am trying this because I want to find out what it is like, musically and otherwise, to perform professionally. It was my second outing with them; the first, last fall, had featured scores from a monastery in Prague that had mostly never been performed.
    The first act, Friday, was a concert at St. John’s the big Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Denver. It was recently visited in these pages for a performance of Bach’s Passion According to St. John by the Boulder Bach Festival. The occasion was a concert featuring Gerald Holbrook, Evanne’s organist. He played a full evening’s worth. Seicento’s part in this was the “Organ Messe du 9E Ton” of Gaspard Corrette (ca. 1671-1733). It alternates between organ solos and responses by the chorus. Gerald discovered that the choral parts for this piece had disappeared into the mists of time, so he re-composed them. The result is rather odd: the choral parts are quite simple, whereas the organ parts are as florid as only the French Baroque can be. In his notes, Gerald assures us that this actually was the performance practice of the day. The whole thing went on for about forty minutes; congregations certainly had longer attention spans and sturdier bladders than today!

    Act two, Monday, was the first dress rehearsal. Or was supposed to be. It snowed. And snowed. Finally Evanne cancelled, the first dress rehearsal I’ve ever seen cancelled in my life. Fearing neither man nor ice, I borrowed a van and drove to the remote Denver suburbs to pick up our portative organ (a small period instrument often used for continuo work in those days). We spent the evening setting up the stage and tuning the organ and harpsichord. On Tuesday we had that rehearsal, and all but about six of us showed—despite the fact that it snowed. Again.
    Act three, Wednesday, was the second dress rehearsal. Acts four, five, and six were concerts at St. John’s, Boulder (where it snowed again for a total of four feet in a week); at St. Thomas Episcopal in Denver (an unusual, quite attractive building in the Spanish Colonial style so well known to us Californians); and at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. This last is a handsome hulk on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, dating to the late Victorian era, whose fifteen minutes of fame was as the location for The Shining. The acoustics in the music hall are to die for.
    In addition to selections from the Corrette, the program was:

• Le Reniement de St. Pierre (Marc-Antoine Charpentier, 1643-1704). A religious drama, one of the first oratorios. A touching and dramatic recounting of the Denial of Peter.
• Jonas (Giacomo Carissimi 1605-1674). Another pre-oratorio, on Jonah and the Whale. Rather wooden in places, I’m afraid.
• Diligam Te, Domine (Jean Gilles 1668-1705). A motet, famous in its day and justly so, full of life and rhythm.

    All this was done very much in the manner of the day: the orchestra was harpsichord, organ, viola de gamba, and two violins, all period instruments tuned to A=415 (rather than the current A=440). Our Latin was to be pronounced as a Frenchman in 1700 would have pronounced it, and—yes!—one of our professors had written a book on this very subject. Later a singer remarked that Gilles’s “Laudans invocabo” sounded very much like “low dance avocado”....

So what do I think of all this? Well, first that trying to run with the big dogs is stressful. I felt in a bit over my head, and worked hard and paranoid all season to make sure I met the standard. (Since I was also doing the Bach Festival and solo and collaborative piano at this time, it got downright desperate at times....) Second, that working with musicians that get it the first time and always do it right is exhilarating. I’d love to always perform at that level. Third, that I am not in love with the early Baroque. Some of this music is enjoyable; none of it has the profundities of Bach or Beethoven. Lastly, that next fall is an all-Purcell concert. He is one of the few composers of that era that I do love, and I’ve never performed any of his choral work. So I’ll probably, stupidly, re-up. If they’ll have me.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Chuck Smythe

Please comment