The early music scene in the Bay Area is not only blessed by the continuous presence of excellent interpreters, ensembles, and artists, but also by the frequent visit of illustrious elders of the early music movement; those who have given historically informed performances of music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods the relevance they have today.
Ton Koopman (70) recently conducted the San Francisco Symphony; English conductor John Eliot Gardiner (72) was in town last week with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists; and last Friday, the American-born conductor, musicologist, and teacher William Christie (70) was in Berkeley for Cal Performances, with a small detachment of his vocal and instrumental Baroque ensemble, Les Arts Florissants.
Christie, who moved to France in 1971 and has become a French citizen, specializes in the performance of neglected or forgotten French repertoire from the Baroque era. In 1979, he founded Les Arts Florissants, named after the 1685 opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and it is in the field of Baroque opera that Christie and his ensemble have achieved fame worldwide — mostly with French opera, but also with works by Handel, Purcell, Mozart, and Monteverdi.
The concert in Berkeley contained only French material, and in spite of its theatrical aspects, no opera at all. Instead, Christie and his select group of exquisite singers and instrumentalists brought a series of Airs sérieux et à boire (“Serious airs and drinking songs”) to the First Congregational Church.
These songs belong to a genre known as air de cour, a type of French secular vocal music that in the course of the 17th Century moved from the street to the salon and became a fashionable form of entertainment for the aristocracy.
With more than 300 surviving airs de cour to his name, composer Michel Lambert (1610-1696) was one of the most prolific exponents of the genre, and more than half the works on the program were from his hand.
With titles like “Stillness, gloom and silence,” “Though Love is the cause of all my sorrow,” and “How lovers divided do languish night and day,” the songs deal with the heartaches and pains of love, sad farewells, sighs heard, and tears shed. All of the songs were presented with appropriate amounts of irony and irreverence by a quintet of fabulous vocalists: Emmanuelle de Negri, soprano; Anna Reinhold, mezzo-soprano; Reinoud Van Mechelen, high tenor; Marc Mauillon, baritone; and Lisandro Abadie, bass.
Solo, and in continuously changing vocal combinations, they interspersed Lambert’s melodramatic musings with more rambunctious offerings from François Couperin (1668–1733), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) and relatively unknown composers who produced airs de cour such as Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre (1633–1678) and Honoré D’Ambruys (fl. ca. 1650–1702).The entire concert was stage-directed as a vague narrative that included a hefty dose of flirtatious frolicking, a wedding ceremony, and two very convincing drunks proclaiming that “Il faut excuser le vin” (Wine has to be forgiven)...
The entire concert was stage-directed as a vague narrative that included a hefty dose of flirtatious frolicking, a wedding ceremony, and two very convincing drunks proclaiming that “Il faut excuser le vin” (Wine has to be forgiven), but the correlation between the actions on stage and the content of the lyrics was not always clear.
Among the highlights of the concert were an intense and emotional rendering of De la Barre’s “Quand une âme est bien atteinte” (Once a soul is captivated) by mezzo Reinhold and an equally impassioned “Jugez de ma douleur en ces tristes adieux” (Ascertain my sorrow in these sad farewells) by soprano de Negri.
The three gentlemen had their moment in the sun with the “New interludes” that Marc-Antoine Charpentier wrote in 1672 for a revival of the one-act comedy Le Mariage forcé (The Forced Marriage) by Molière (1664).
In this piece of boisterous buffoonery, “three masters of do re me fa sol la” try to decide what to sing about, and they work their way through nonsense rhymes; animal noises, including the sound of a “nightingale of Arcadia” (donkey); and some rollicking interactions with members of the accompanying instrumental ensemble, consisting of Florence Malgoire and Tami Troman (violin); Myriam Rignol (viola da gamba); Thomas Dunford on theorbo, and William Christie, directing from the harpsichord.
The concert ended with the five singers addressing the audience directly and up-close from the front edge of the stage, with this sage advice by word of composer Michel Lambert: “Aimez, aimez, le reste n’est rien” (Love, love, for all the rest means naught).