At the Festival de la Chaise-Dieu, small forces make a big impact, especially in the Bach Passions.

Festival de la Chaise-Dieu
La Chaise-Dieu, France

The Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips (director)

Saturday 26 August 2000
Josquin des Prez: Missa Pange lingua
Magnificats by Clemens non Papa and Gombert
motets by Josquin des Prez and Gombert

Sunday 27 August 2000
Allegri: Miserere mei Deus
Tallis: Spem in alium
motets by John Taverner and John Sheppard

La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy
Jean-Claude Malgoire (conductor)
Friday 25 August 2000
Saturday 26 August 2000
Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610)

Gabrieli Consort & Players
Paul McCreesh (conductor)

Friday 25 August 2000
Sunday 27 August 2000
Bach: St. Matthew Passion
     Sophie Daneman (soprano)
     Diana Moore (mezzo-soprano)
     Mark Padmore (Evangelist and tenor solos)
     Stephan Loges (Christus and bass solos)

Saturday 26 August 2000
Bach: St. John Passion
      Susan Hemington-Jones (soprano)
     Robin Tyson (countertenor)
     Mark Padmore (Evangelist and tenor solos)
     Stephan Loges (Christus and bass solos)

 

The generous arts funding of the Mitterand era may be a thing of the past, but there are still exciting things happening on the French summer music festival circuit - and not just at Aix-en-Provence and Beaune. La Chaise-Dieu, a tiny mountainside town in the Auvergne, presents two weeks of concerts every August at the Abbey Church of St. Robert. The program of the Festival de la Chaise-Dieu 2000, held from 23 August to 3 September, may have seemed like a safe collection of popular works - Handel's Messiah and Music for the Royal Fireworks, the Bach Passions and Brandenburg Concertos, Gregorio Allegri's Miserere (with its famous high Cs for the treble soloist), Beethoven symphonies and quartets, the Berlioz Requiem and, yes, Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne - but the first weekend (which featured Renaissance and Baroque works) provided some thrilling, even newsworthy music-making.

Unfortunately, there were no surprises from the Tallis Scholars' two concerts. The first, a program of Franco-Flemish works including Josquin's Missa Pange lingua and Magnificats by Gombert and Clemens non Papa, was given in the tiny, low-ceilinged Salle Cziffra, a room that suits chamber music better than Renaissance polyphony. Perhaps it's unfair to judge the Tallis Scholars under those circumstances, but the performance was bland, homogenized, chilly - everything for which Peter Phillips' ensemble has been criticized in recent years. The second concert, in the Abbey Church, came off better. The program's title - "Allegri's Miserere" - was something of a misnomer, the titular piece having been inserted (for no apparent reason other than its popularity) into a program of Tudor-era works by Taverner, Tallis and Sheppard. The ploy shouldn't have been necessary: the Festival went to the expense of bringing over enough singers to perform Thomas Tallis' legendary Spem in alium for 40 voices. Stereo speakers simply can't do justice to Spem, and an opportunity to hear this miraculous work in person is always a special treat - even when, as in this case, the conditions were less than ideal: the singers were divided into two groups and separated by more than 20 meters, limiting the conductor to crude time-keeping gestures. As usual, the Tallis Scholars pronounced and phrased everything as if it were Palestrina, but - at least in English repertory - they haven't lost the spark of excitement and wonder that made them famous in the 1980s.

The newsworthy events at La Chaise-Dieu this year, however implausibly, were performances of those Mighty Masterworks of the Choral Literature, Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 and the Bach Passions. In line with current (and controversial) musicological ideas, all three works were performed with one singer on each part, with no "choir" as we understand the term today.

Monteverdi's Vespro della beata Vergine of 1610 is La Chaise-Dieu's signature work , performed at every festival; the 2000 edition, given on 25 and 26 August, featured Jean-Claude Malgoire conducting La Grande Ecurie et La Chambre du Roy. The lesson of this ostensibly one-singer-per-part Vespers was that if you are giving a solo-voice performance, you should stick with the idea consistently. Malgoire engaged ten soloists for this performance (one of Monteverdi's Psalm settings calls for ten voices); evidently determined to get his money's worth, the conductor used all ten of them everywhere he could, regardless of whether a piece was scored for five, six or eight voices. Not only did this cause balance problems, but the blend between the singers doubling up on parts was often poor - and in the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria, downright ghastly. Malgoire - and, apparently, his audiences - seem willing in general to accept a much higher level of inaccuracy in execution than would be tolerated elsewhere. Add that to the conductor's inconsistent application of his stated scoring ideal and you get a disappointing, frustrating performance, some lovely singing in the solo concertos notwithstanding.

Sloppy execution is never a problem with Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players, but the concept in this case - one-singer-per-part Bach - caused a few worries. Festival organizers were initially skittish about doing the Passions in the large abbey church with such small forces, but McCreesh insisted it would work - and as performances of the St. Matthew on August 25 and 27 and the St. John on August 26 triumphantly demonstrated, he was right.

McCreesh did make one concession to practicality, using a separate group of four soloists to sing the Evangelist, Christus and the arias rather than having those singers take on all the choruses as well. (Singing three Passions in three days is quite a workout, after all.) Those soloists were marvelous: Mark Padmore's Evangelist was by turns tender, passionate, delicate and animated; Stefan Loges was an extraordinary Christus, bringing a very human vulnerability to a role usually performed with a certain reverent distance. Countertenor Robin Tyson and soprano Susan Hemington-Jones (in the St. John Passion) and soprano Sophie Daneman (in the St. Matthew) sang their arias with their accustomed confidence and eloquence, and the remarkable young mezzo-soprano Diana Moore (whose voice sounds like that of the young Lorraine Hunt) gave a rapturous account of the St. Matthew's alto solos.

Yet it was the Gabrieli Consort, performing the choruses mostly one-singer-per-part in the St. Matthew and two-per-part in the St. John (as Bach's autograph materials indicate), that made these performances extraordinary. Naturally, the small forces endowed Bach's music with delicacy and clarity: all the parts, vocal and instrumental, were audible. Yet there was plenty of power when it was really called for - "Sind Blitzen, sind Donner" thundered with the best of them - along with a flexibility of phrasing and delivery that even the best choir can't achieve without sounding overly drilled. (Almost inevitably, a choral performance of Bach's Magnificat the night after the final Passion performance seemed muddy and stiff in comparison.) The really striking thing was how the fully scored movements - the opening choruses, the chorales, and especially the crowd choruses - took on the rhetorical subtlety that we usually expect only from the solos. What's more, the Passions were much more dramatically credible than usual: the "crowd" singing "We have no king but Caesar! Crucify him!" or "He is calling for Elijah" came across as a little mob gathered outside Pilate's palace or a group of spectators at Golgotha, not The Entire People of Israel or Sinful Humankind or some such abstraction. With singers and musicians as good as McCreesh's, the effect of single-voice Bach performance was so persuasive that this listener wondered why anyone ever imagined the composer had done it any other way.

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