Maybe it was the fact that the Golden Globes were just getting underway in Los Angeles when the concert at Berkeley’s Church of St. Mary Magdalen started on Sunday afternoon. It could have had something to do with the neatly groomed beard. Whatever the reason, the resemblance was hard to shake: Baritone Nikolas Nackley looked an awful lot like George Clooney.
The glamorous leading man image was anything but a distraction from the two Bach cantatas on the free-admission Cantata Collective bill. For texts brimming over with erotically romantic language of Jesus as the seeker’s spiritual bridegroom and music full of mellifluous sinuosities, a little Hollywood heat felt just right.
Violist Anthony Martin made that point explicitly in his opening remarks. Many of Bach Leipzig listeners, he said, must have been all but scandalized by the composer’s dramatically charged settings. The German Verlangen, which figured in the titles of both these dialogue cantatas, BWV 32 and 49, means longing or desire.
Nackley and his vocal partner, soprano Tonia D’Amelio, delivered the goods and then some in singing both vivid and technically assured. The chamber-sized orchestral forces proved more inconsistent.
Liebster Jesu, Mein Verlangen (Dearest Jesus, my desire) came first. Cradled in Marc Schachman’s caressing oboe phrases, D’Amelio got things off to a gleaming start in her opening aria, beautifully spun toward the closing, melismatically urgent lines. She prevailed over some notably ragged violin work (Lisa Weiss and Kati Kyme traded off first chair duties for the afternoon).
Nackley engaged her with a firm, reassuring tone form-fitted to Jesus’s lines: “Here, in My Father’s place, a troubled spirit finds me.” Several phrases on, the soprano offered a rapturous response: “How lovely, indeed, is your dwelling, Lord, mighty Sabaoth.”
In anticipation of the cantata’s highlight, a sensual and playful duet, the string players rallied with a fleet, run-rich orchestral interlude. Nackley and D’Amelio were wonderful in what followed, their phrases copying and pursuing each other as they traded small but earnest smiles. As the aria turned taut, almost percussive, an air of mounting ecstasy took hold. The closing chorale, performed first by the pros and then as an audience sing-along, brought things to a becalmed conclusion.
Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen, (I go forth and seek with longing) was an even richer and more textured musical treat. The opening Sinfonia, performed here as a kind of organ concerto, with the nimbly expert Avi Stein as soloist, laid a sumptuously elaborate table. Then over a hauntingly strange organ figure, Nackley heightened the opening aria with his tense, anticipatory phrasing,
The recitative dialogue that followed got a little show-biz treatment when D’Amelio stood far off at first and then approached her “bridegroom” to, as the text has it, “fall at your feet.” The singers’ two voices, which blended gorgeously throughout, seemed to fuse especially tightly here.
D’Amelio, whose exquisite diction never felt fussy or self-conscious, may have had her finest moments in the aria that followed. With cellist William Skeen as her partner, she gave the lines “I am glorious, I am beautiful” a kind of quietly glowing vanity, a delight in the spiritual transformation to come. An arm flung wide at just the right moment seemed ready to embrace it.
Nothing was lovelier, nothing more clearly a marker of Bach’s enlarging genius, than the final aria and chorale. As Nackley envisioned these exalted lovers’ union in densely embroidered phrases, D’Amelio launched the long-lined chorale tune above. It was a courtship and a spiritual aspiration all at once, the sheer musical pleasure of it underscored by the organ’s near spasmodic celebration.
The next Cantata Collective performance is February 18 at St. Mary Magdalen. The Academy Awards will still be a couple of weeks off, but Bach’s flair for the drama and musical special effects can always stand on its own.
