Music: Report from the Boston Early Music Festival

The biennial Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) has grown in recent years from a geeky specialist  gathering to a large affair that brings in international tourists and appeals to a diverse range of tastes. It is perhaps the best place in the US to see a great range of music from medieval to classical periods at venues ranging from 25 to 800 people. I had a chance to sample a variety of BEMF wares in mid-June. Predictably, the performances and programming varied in execution and creativity.

The highlight of each festival is a fully staged performance of a baroque opera, often very obscure, as was this year’s Le Carnaval de Venise by André Campra (1660-1744). Campra was of the generation between Lully and Rameau. He was music director at Notre Dame de Paris, and was later director of music at Versailles for Louis XV. He favored the opéra-ballet form, elaborate pageants with singing, dancing, exotic plots (often set in foreign locales), and rich orchestration. Le Carnaval was such a work. Featuring a slight plot of romance and intrigue set among the canals in Venice, the BEMF production was remarkably funny and diverting, perhaps because the directors truly engaged in the spirit of an entertainment, rather than of a painstakingly reconstructed artifact. There were dancing bears, multiple ballets (all done with authentic reconstructed steps derived from written descriptions of the time), and tuneful arias and choruses. The orchestra of 24 featured a robust string ensemble with multiple violas divided into three sections, yielding a rich string texture. Sung recitatives were accompanied by a fuller sound than in past years, often including lutes/theorbos, harpsichord, organ, and cello/bass. This seems to be a developing BEMF tradition, supported by both recent scholarship and perhaps by the festival directors both being lutenists. Staging and sets were clever, but lacked the expensive spectacle doubtless present at Versailles (what, no onstage fireworks, fountains, and golden peacocks?). The whole package was delightful, and convinced me that these French baroque pageants were very much worth reviving if done with the right musical and stage direction.

Less convincing was the performance of Handel’s La Resurrezione, a very early oratorio composed by the 23 year old Handel as he tried to impress Rome with his virtuosic keyboard and compositional skills. The rather odd libretto centered on dramatic, even quasi-erotic interactions between Mary Magdalene, Mary Cleophas, the apostle John, an angel, and Satan in the day following Jesus’ crucifixion. While the pope had no problem with this free literary treatment of the Bible, he did ban women performers, forcing Handel to use only castrati for the upper roles. Significantly, this performance did not revive castrato technique, and used excellent female soloists instead of the male countertenors now in vogue. The oratorio was well played and sung, and interesting as a peek into the developing Handel’s art, but did not make much of a case for this early Handel work. It felt very much like a compositional exercise designed to impress, and lacked his later operas’ dramatic flow. If I had not read the libretto, I would not have had a clue from the music that this was about the pending resurrection of Christ.

My other festival samplings included a buoyant concert of baroque period music for guitars, percussion, and voice by Tembembe Ensemble Continuo, a group of Mexican musicologist/performers devoted to early Mexican music. The concert revealed how Spanish musical models informed Mexican compositions of the 17-19^th centuries by pairing Spanish and Mexican works derived from similar sources. This fun concert featured singing, dancing, and outstanding baroque guitar playing by Eloy Cruz, but I wished that the Spanish antecedents were longer and more developed, so I could better link them to the following Mexican pieces. An organ concert by David Yearsley in the First Lutheran Church on the esteemed Fowles tracker organ mostly featured works from Bach and his predecessors, and was nicely programmed to pair complementary works, e.g. the Bach Fantasia in C minor with a contemporary French piece that revealed how Bach used and was influenced by French ornamentation and practice. Another interesting pairing was the Bach Fugue in F major (BWV 540) with the Mozart Fantasia in F minor, each featuring killer pedalwork and a virtuosic double fugue (I liked Bach’s better). Lastly, a “fringe” concert by the string ensemble Les Bostonades featured works of the Berlin school of the late 1700s (C.P.E. Bach, Frederick the Great, Graun) that could have benefitted from more precision in execution and more freedom and risk-taking in interpretation. C.P.E. Bach (Johann’s third son) was this year’s trendy composer at BEMF, with a complete opus of his newly edited works being auctioned off, and multiple concerts featuring his music. My impression thus far is of a streaky pre-classical composer with output ranging from brilliant to dull, but very stimulating when the performed works are carefully chosen and performed with élan. Look to see more of him in upcoming concerts in your local venues.