The Portland Conservatory of Music has only a few hundred students, but several of Portland’s best musicians have an association with the school, and for concertgoers, it is a fount of varied, polished and inexpensive performances (including the free weekly Noonday Concerts). But its most crucial offerings have been a pair of brief but important annual festivals that explore different ends of music’s historical spectrum – the Portland Early Music Festival, in October, and the Back Cove Contemporary Music Festival, in May.
This year, the school changed its plan, opting to present these weekend-long festivals on alternate years, rather than annually. As someone who was hoping to see both festivals expand – a week each would be a good start – I find this disappointing news. But then, it’s miraculous for a school of this size to present as many concerts as it does.
On Friday evening, the eighth installment of the weekend-long Portland Early Music Festival got underway at Woodfords Congregational Church, with a program devoted mostly to vocal works by Claudio Monteverdi, with a pair of illuminating lute pieces by his contemporaries, Pietro Paolo Melii and Johannes Kapsberger.
The singers, who all live and work in Maine, though a few have national or international careers, were sopranos Jennifer Bates and Christine Letcher, mezzo-soprano Andrea Graichen, tenor Bruce Fithian, and basses John David Adams and Patrick Volker. Timothy Burris, who directs the festival (and also runs the Portland Early Music series at the Cathedral of St. Luke’s), provided the spare lute accompaniments to the Monteverdi works, and gave fluid accounts of the solo lute pieces.
Though the program was short – it ran just over an hour, without intermission – it offered an appealing overview of Monteverdi’s career as a madrigalist, the earliest works, “Lamento d’Ariana” and “Zefiro torna e’bel tempo” dating to the “Sixth Book of Madrigals” (1614), and the latest (the duet “Pur ti meo”) from Monteverdi’s last surviving opera, “L’incoronazione di Poppea” (1643).
Only the pair of works from the “Sixth Book of Madrigals” demanded the full ensemble, and in both, the voices were well-balanced, though not quite the homogenous readings recordings have made listeners accustomed to.
That’s not to say that the performances were unpolished. The singers wove their vocal lines together beautifully, and they were clearly mindful of the passions expressed in the texts of these bittersweet love songs.
But the performance also raised an interesting historical question about what the sound of the 17th century really was. In the homogenous approach cultivated today, individual vocal distinctiveness is smoothed over, in favor of a velvety, inextricably unified ensemble sound. Generally, that style of sound is the province of permanent ensembles with the rehearsal time necessary to produce that level of tightly compressed ensemble singing.
As choral sound goes, it can be thoroughly seductive, particularly in richly harmonized works like Monteverdi’s. But this music was composed for both court ensembles and cultivated amateurs to sing at home, in those days before recordings. So it seems likely that what most 17th century listeners heard was a more casual sound, closer in both texture and spirit to what the festival’s singers produced on Friday. The ensemble’s sound was solid, but not so suave that you could not easily focus on the singers’ individual qualities.
Those qualities were estimable. Fithian, whom I’ve heard more frequently as a conductor (he directs the St. Mary Schola), harpsichordist and organist than as a singer, brought a pleasant timbre to his thoughtfully shaped tenor lines, and the basses, who are heard regularly as soloists from within Portland’s choirs, gave the ensembles a firm foundation.
Several singers enjoyed a brighter spotlight, in pieces for smaller groups. In “Si doce è’l tormento,” another lovesick soliloquy, Bates produced a flexible, richly expressive sound, inflected with only a hint of vibrato. She offered a different side of her artistry in the flightier, more assertive “Quel sguardo sdegnosetto.”
Bates and Letcher were well-matched in “Zefiro torna e disoavi accenti,” which opened the program, and she and Graichen gave a magnificent account of “Pur ti miro,” the third act duet between Nero and Poppea, from “Incoronazione.” That was a clear highlight of the program, although the account of “Lamento della Ninfa,” by Bates, Fithian, Adams and Volker, was a strong contender.
Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times who lives in Portland. He can be contacted at:
allankozinn@gmail.com
Twitter: kozinn
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