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SEEN AND HEARD UK
CONCERT REVIEW Gower Festival 2010
(2) – Monteverdi et al : The Gonzaga Band, St John’s Church, Gowerton, 24.7 2010 (GPu) Jamie Savan (cornett, mute cornett) Richard Sweeney (theorbo) Alastair Ross (chamber organ, harpsichord) Cozzolani, Domine ad adiuvandum Banchieri, Dixit Dominus Merula, Nigra Sum Piccinini, Toccata Finetti, Laudate pueri Palestrina, Pulchra es Petrobelli, Laetatus sum Monteverdi, Nisi Dominus Rossi, Toccata Lassus, Lauda Jerusalem Kapsberger, Toccata Monteverdi, Ave maris stella Banchieri, Magnificat Cazzati, Regina caeli It would be fair to say that the church of St. John the Evangelist in Gowerton, built at the beginning of the 1880s, doesn’t look very much like one of the private chapels of a ruling family of the Italian Renaissance (though some of the decoration in the chancel is perhaps not a million miles away). But listening to the Gonzaga Band (named after the family who ruled Mantua from 1328 to 1708) in St. John’s it was easy to imagine oneself transported to such a chapel. The Gonzaga Band’s approach to Italian sacred music of the seventeenth century is distinctive and appealingly inventive.
The Gonzaga Band:
Faye Newton (soprano)
On this particular occasion Alastair Ross (one of the great stalwarts of early music performance in Britain) took the place of unavailable regular Steven Devine at the chamber organ and harpsichord, but this did nothing to diminish the coherence and chamber-like sense of interplay which characterises the Gonaga’s music making. Starting from the unarguable premise that in seventeenth-century Italy “the dividing line between composer and performer was not distinct … the musical ‘work’ was not a fixed concept, and improvisational creativity was an integral part of musical life” (to quote from Jamie Savan’s programme note), their work largely takes the form of ‘chamber’ arrangements of devotional music originally written for decidedly larger forces. The results are almost always persuasive and rewarding. Naturally something is lost when a piece for double choir (such as Monteverdi’s Nisi dominus and Ave maris stella, or Chiari Margarita Cozzolani’s Domine ad adiuvandum) is redrafted for the specific forces of the Gonzaga band; but there are compensating gains too, in a far greater intimacy, a sense of personal devotion rather than communal ritual and a possible pleasure in individual vocal (or instrumental) lines not always possible in the original form of such pieces.
No doubt such an approach might be disastrous in the wrong hands (and mouths). But the Gonzaga Band displays taste and judgement in all it does, whether that be in the making of the arrangements themselves, their shared sense of idiom and well developed skills of mutual listening or their sheer technical competence. The programme played at this concert took its essential shape from the model provided by Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine; as in that great work five psalms were here alternated with extra-liturgical motets, the whole beginning with a setting of Domine ad adiuvandum and ending with a Magnificat (by Adriano Banchieri), which was topped off, as it were, by a wonderful, decorated setting of Regina caeli by Maurizio Cazzati.
As well as throwing a new light on the relatively familiar – as with the two pieces by Monteverdi – and giving one the opportunity to hear them from a different angle, as it were, this was a programme which also included a healthy proportion of far less familiar music. Sometimes the unfamiliar can, of course, leave one feeling simply that its obscurity was probably deserved; but here, without exception, we were treated to pieces of real quality and often of considerable beauty. That was true, for example, of the Laetatus sum of Francesco Petrobelli, in which the interplay of Faye Newton’s vocal lines and Jamie Savan’s cornett produced passages of radiant splendour. Francesco Rognoni’s version of Palestrina’s five-voice Pulchra es, a version for solo voice and organ, was played by cornett and organ – and sounded marvellous, full of delicacy and colour, and in the Band’s version of Orlando de Lassus’ Lauda Jerusalem Savan’s cornett decorated Newton’s vocal lines altogether delightfully. The continuo players had their solo features too, and in the process varied the purely devotional mood a little. Alastair Ross, at the harpsichord, relished the bold harmonic language of a toccata by Michelangelo Rossi, and Richard Sweeney played a toccata by Kapsberger on his fine-sounding theorbo, an interpretation which had a nice sense of space and silence and in which he produced some attractive bell-like textures.
Enterprising evenings such as this can only further enhance the reputation for quality and friendliness that, under the excellent artistic direction of Gareth Walters, the Gower Festival has earned in recent years. Many fine chamber ensembles, pianists and singers have now performed in one or other of the Gower’s many attractive and intimate churches – making one’s way down a country lane to a village church to hear some of the best young musicians from this country and elsewhere is a particularly good way to spend a summer evening. Plans are already afoot for the 2011 Festival … and they include performances by the outstanding Spanish mezzo Clara Mouriz, the Gould Piano Trio, the Carducci and St. Petersburg Quartets, the Orlando Consort, the Swansea Bach Choir and many more. But don’t tell too many people – most of the churches are pretty small!
Glyn Pursglove