SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT

Monteverdi, Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; Goebbels, Songs of Wars I Have Seen:  Pacific Musicworks, Stephen Stubbs, musical director; Seattle Chamber Players, Anu Tali, conductor, Heiner Goebbels, stage director. On the Boards, Seattle, 5.3.2010 (BJ)

 

Perhaps it’s true, as we are sometimes assured in another context, that size matters. But this program served as confirmation, if such were needed, that size and artistic value do not always enjoy a positive correlation.

 

Counting both vocalists and instrumentalists, there were just nine musicians on stage for Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in the first half. For Heiner Goebbels’s piece after intermission, that number was roughly doubled. But it was Combattimento, an imperishable masterpiece, that stayed in my mind on the way home, whereas the considerably longer Songs of Wars I Have Seen made a much less indelible impression.

 

Born in 1952 in Neustadt/Weinstrasse, Germany, Goebbels has enjoyed much international success through his origination of a genre of “staged concerts,” of which these Songs are an example. Exploring the effects of war by way of Gertrude Stein’s memoir about her life in France during World War II, the work calls for 17 instrumentalists–who also speak the text–with the addition of some electronic elements as well as fairly simple lighting effects. Playing for more than an hour, it had its moments of interest and even beauty, most notably in a kind of concluding “Last Post,” impressively played on this occasion by trumpeter Tony DiLorenzo. But the very repetitive musical invention seems to me much less imaginative than the rather similarly conceived blend of contemporary and pop styles pioneered some years ago by Nali Gruber and his colleagues of the former Austrian “MOB art & ton ART” group. I felt also that the relation between words and music was neither close enough to be cogent in itself, nor differentiated enough to exert its own kind of illuminating conflict.

 

The piece was conducted by the young Estonian-born Anu Tali. She drew evidently committed playing from the Seattle Chamber Players, though I think she would do well to ponder Adrian Boult’s strictures about what he called “the Grecian vase effect”–for far too much of the time, her left hand simply and uneconomically mirrored her right.

 

Despite lacking, of course, the explicit contemporary resonance of Songs of Wars I Have Seen, Monteverdi’s 1624 setting of a text adapted from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata evoked much more of the sorrow and pity Goebbels was presumably aiming to call forth in his listeners. Quite aside from the Monteverdi’s sheer genius and the vivid impact of his “stile moderno,” this was partly because a story about individuals always carries a stronger emotional punch than a more generalized tale, and partly because Pacific Musicworks (sensibly re-named from Pacific Operaworks a few months ago to reflect a broader range of activity) gave it so powerfully focused a performance.

 

The principal singing part is that of the story-teller. Tenor Ross Hauck, the admirable Ulisse in Operaworks’ production of Il ritorno d’Ulisse a year ago, once again demonstrated his remarkable command of Monteverdian style: this was singing with an impeccable purity and clarity of tone, line, and diction. Soprano Terri Richter and baritone Thomas Thompson sang the less extended parts of Clorinda and Tancredi scarcely less compellingly, and all three deployed a touching range of movement and gesture, choreographed by Anna Mansbridge, and reinforced by Claire Cowie’s simple and attractive sets and Connie Yun’s effective lighting.

 

Both in the Monteverdi and in the sonata by the little-known 17-century Venetian composer Dario Castello that served as an agreeable curtain-raiser, Stephen Stubbs led his ensemble of two violins, viola, harp, harpsichord, and cello to splendid effect, as well as playing his imposing chitarrone beautifully. He and his group are among the finest performers of early baroque (and late renaissance) music I have encountered, and Seattle is fortunate in possessing them.

 

Bernard Jacobson