Edinburgh Festival (2) Monteverdi Madrigals: Il Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini (conductor), Greyfriars Kirk at the Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, 11-17. 8.2007 (MM)

 

Much is made of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals by historians of music.  This formidable body of music that emerged over Monteverdi's long life dramatically tracks the rise of solo voice declamation of theatrical text and the demise of multi-voice, polyphonic settings of lyric poetry.  However not much is made of these extraordinary pieces by early music performers, perhaps because of their inextricable fusion to Italian sensibility and language,  as well as to their inherently virtuosic technical and musical nature.  Surely, it is difficult to find places for such brief pieces in larger programs, and then there are those of us who suspect that music of such dramatic force transcends the preciousness associated with much early music and therefore does not belong in such programs anyway.

Italian conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini organized a cycle of fifty-one madrigals coming from the eight separate books published by Monteverdi over approximately fifty years.   The Alessandrini cycle was spread over five, early evening one-hour programs within seven days.  After the first, well-attended program,  word was out that this was the hot ticket at the festival, stuffing the Greyfriars Kirk with an excited audience for the remaining four evenings.

Rinaldo Alessandrini cycle's enacted these small pieces, many of them masterpieces and some not so small after all, with his on-going group Il Concerto Italiano, here comprised of a pool of seven singers, two omnipresent theorbos, three violins, a cello, bass and harpsichord.   The cycle became operatic indeed as we became familiar with Alessandrini's singers who soon lost identity as the accomplished young Italian singers they were, and became the actual Tirsis and Cloris, Pastorellas and Pastores, the Amarilli and the suffering poets themselves who speak out in these madrigals. These mythic characters plunged us into an inexhaustible state of tension, our desperate needs teased but never fulfilled, our souls at once torn and satisfied by passion.

Monteverdi lived with this poetic tension over his long life, and it was his muse.  Over the five programs our minds were at first charmed by Renaissance madrigal art itself and then, gradually, astounded by the Monteverdi genius as it discovered the solo voice, the expressive possibilities soaring when voices are freed of over-arching musical obligations.

The most memorable moments of the cycle were always the five voiced madrigals on poetry by the great Italian Renaissance poets.  The early books (I, II, III) were at their most exciting when setting fluid, mixed meter verses by Torquate Tasso, poetry that offered ample opportunities for indulging in natural and emotional description.  The masterful, harmonically highly articulated middle books (IV and V) using Battista Guarini's complicated pastoral Il Pastor Fido and the dramatically vivid verses by Ottavio Rinuccini (the librettist for Peri's Dafne and Eurydice, the very first operas) take the five voice polyphonic madrigal to dramatic heights never surpassed.

Though Monteverdi's book VI comes after his first very successful Mantuan operatic efforts it does not pursue the solo voices that opera had discovered, preferring the traditional five madrigal voices here to musically cloth the lament of Rinuccini's Arianna, Monteverdi's lost second opera of which the only existing fragment is this lament, in the opera obviously for solo voice.  It is in this book that Monteverdi discovers the brilliant and complex sonnets by both the ultra-modern poet of the moment, Giambattista Marino and the venerable first of the Renaissance love poets, Francesco Petrarca.  The long lines of these metaphorically involved and structurally complex sonnets trigger intensive experimentation through the addition of instrumental musical textures.  This frees the poets' words to float freely and decoratively above the basic musical groundwork, and for Monteverdi to indulge in five-voice musical elaborations of stridently intense emotions.

The final two books, VII and VIII, hold the great solo madrigals, among them the extended scene Tirsi e Clori, an intense love letter by a suffering pastore, a lament for an emotionally overwrought nymph (with three commenting shepherds), and finally the extended Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda which indulges its narrator to recount the brutal actions and terrible ironies of Torquate Tasso's knight Tancredi who unknowingly thrusts his sword into his beloved, impressively aided by Monteverdi's indulgence in his newly found agitated style.  These madrigals were sung full-throttle in full-scale histrionic melodrama, at once over done and yet perfectly done.

The last madrigal in the cycle returned to the multi-voiced format, a six voice concerted (with instruments) setting of one of the most famous poems from Petrarch's Canzoniere,  'Hor che'l ciel e la terra e'l vento tace' (Now that heaven, earth and the winds are silent).  This complex work, really a dramatic oratorio, was a most fitting and moving conclusion to Monteverdi's life-long musical adventure, as it was a synthesis of the most basic expressive techniques of sixteenth century multi-voiced madrigals with the most audacious of early seventeenth-century musical discoveries. 

Ironically, conductor Alessandrini's powerful presence was almost unseen, as his back was to the audience while he ignited and controlled these five hours of on-the-edge emotions and sublime art.  Although the program booklet did not identify the singers who sang the solo madrigals, these artists received huge ovations as did, finally Maestro Alessandrini himself.  This Monteverdi/Alessandrini madrigal cycle was a powerful, and one fears,  once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Unfortunately Mo. Alessandrini has been engaged to conduct the three extant Monteverdi operas in new productions at Milan's La Scala, a theater and an artistic environment hardly appropriate for these works. 

 

Michael Milenski

 

Michael Milenski is General Director Emeritus of Long Beach Opera, California. He retired in 2004 after 25 years at Long Beach and his current website www.capsuropera.com tracks opera from Genoa through the south of France to Barcelona.

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