Il Complesso Barocco

Director Alan Curtis

This concert, part of the Lufthansa Festival, had more than its share of
vicissitudes. The festival has had minimal publicity, and the evening
turned out to be horribly wet, so an entirely accessible programme with a
highbrow movie tie-in less than half filled the smallish venue. And a bug
knocked out the counter-tenor Roberto Balconi and one of the sopranos,
Rossana Bertini. The stand-in soprano, whose name I'm afraid I didn't
catch, was extremely good. But they couldn't scramble a counter-tenor who
knew all the Gesualdo, though amazingly they found one who knew book 4, and
the programme was reconfigured accordingly. The resulting line-up of
singers amusingly descended in height from bass to top soprano. They
generally gave a fine performance, as did the continuo, which consisted of
theorbo, harp and Alan Curtis on the harpsichord.

Il Complesso Barocco seems to be an Italian equivalent of Les Arts
Florissants, with its American director and virtuoso ensemble performing
Italian baroque repertoire. They record for Virgin Veritas, mainly
madrigals, but also a couple of Handel operas. Curtis' style is a lot more
austere than Christie's, but tonight's performance consisted of dramatic
works performed with a fine sense of drama.

The Monteverdi part of the programme, which survived intact, consisted both
madrigals and explicitly theatrical pieces. It was striking how little
difference there was in the music and word setting between the two. The
main difference, of course, was simply that there was more than one
singer's voice to the point of view of the madrigal text.

T'amo mia vita, a conventional evocation of blissful love, and Gira il
nemico insidioso, a semi-comic retread of the militia amoris trope,
suggested an inner theatre within the lover's soul or consciousness. The
multiple voices add depth and vividness to the evocation of the experience
of love. Conersely, Pur ti miro is explicitly a duet between two lovers --
Monteverdi would have had to write it for the end of Poppea if someone else
hadn't just done so -- but evokes a blissful sense of unity through smooth
harmonic progressions and shared climaxes. The two sopranos found its
breathtaking beauty.

Ferrari's Amanti io vi so dire, a brief Ovidian Ars amatoria for soprano,
combines the dramatic character type of the world-weary cynic with the
musical and verbal rhetoric of a madrigal. Roberta Invernizzi gave a
bravura performance full of character. She is an elegant singer, something
like a slightly earthy version of Anna Caterina Antonacci (vocally and in
person), with a beautiful though not forceful lower register.

Two more conventional madrigals, O mio bene and Zefiro torna, were followed
by the entirely theatrical Lamento della ninfa in which the bass and two
tenors describe the nymph's desolation and form a sympathetic backing group
(not a million miles from the one in the advertisement for the Fiat Tipo)
to the nymph's own lament, again beatufilly performed by Invernizzi.

The Gesualdo part of the programme was reduced to Moro, lasso. The stand-in
counter-tenor didn't blend in, and there was a slight sense of tension,
even desperation, in the performance itself rather than in the lover's
soul. Another Monteverdi duet for two sopranos, full of fireworks, replaced
two other Gesualdo pieces.

The programme ended with an enjoyable performance of Sigismondo d'India's
Il pastor fido, which perhaps anticipates the claim to the summary "nothing
happens, she dies" by two hundred and fifty years. Gesualdo and Sigismondo
fascinatingly evoke emotion not so much as an effect of narrative and
rhetoric, as Monteverdi does, but a more or less physical effect in the
music that finds a resonance in the listener.