Les Voix Baroques
- Artistic director Matthew White
- Music at Sharon
- At Sharon Temple
- In Sharon, Ont., on Sunday
Just when you think that wonders have nearly ceased in the world of early music, along come Les Voix Baroques, a small cluster of six singers and two players - a keyboard and a plucked string - to show you that wonders never do cease.
Sunday afternoon, which may have been the hottest so far this season, when some of the more jaded among us feared we might be broiled or bored at the Sharon Temple, such base fears were utterly dispelled.
The organizers of Music at Sharon had dealt with the heat by the simple expedient of opening the temple's main-floor doors and second-floor windows. The heat rose and vanished and the air circulated, leaving the audience comfortable in the temple's lovely shaded interior.
Then, on came Les Voix Baroques to sing three major, rarely heard 17th-century dramatic cantatas - really short, trail-blazing oratorios: one by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and two by Giacomo Carissimi. They performed with uncommon grace and distinction, and not of a finicky academic kind. Each of these performances, in full keeping with the biblical dramas they represented, packed a palpable emotional wallop.
Charpentier's Le Reniement de saint Pierre (The Repudiation of Saint Peter) tells the anguished story of the disciple Peter's bold, incautious claim that he will never deny Jesus, only to fulfill Jesus's calm, prophetic rejoinder that before the cock crows, he will in fact deny Him three times.
Carissimi's Job recounts the harrowing struggle of the citizen Job, with the help of an angel, against the temptations and wiles of the Devil, who plays in vain upon Job's every susceptibility to gain control of his soul.
In Carissimi's Jephte, the commander of the Israelites vows to God that if He will give him victory over the Ammonites, he, Jephte, will make a sacrifice of the first person he meets when he returns. Jephte does win his victory, but the first person who runs to greet him in his triumph is his only daughter, Filia. Despairing, he tells her of his vow. Filia resigns herself to die, but begs for two months' respite in the mountains to bewail the fact that she will die a virgin and childless.
These severely moral stories inspired music of great ingenuity and power from the French Charpentier and the Italian Carissimi. Les Voix Baroques have revisited the exceptional results and have inhabited them superbly.
Of the six singers, individual ones portrayed individual characters and all six sang in the choruses.
In the Charpentier, alto Matthew White, in fine voice, was Peter, first loyal and self-assured, then fearful and craven. The final chorus representing his bitter, contrite tears was searing, both as music and as communication.
In Carissimi's Job, for just three soloists, White was the troubled yet steadfast Job, soprano Shannon Mercer - singing better than I'd yet heard her - was the bright, supportive angel, and baritone Sumner Thompson, a resourceful and vigorous dramatic singer, was the cunning, plausible Devil.
In the magnificent Jephte, surely Carissimi's masterpiece, Thompson was an imposing Jephte and Mercer was a brilliant Filia ranging with skill and passion from the exuberant vivacity of Filia's first glad daughterly greeting to the tragic lamentation of her inevitable doom. In Filia's final solo, sopranos Agnes Zsigovics and Catherine Webster provided exquisitely the three haunting echoes. The group's excellent tenor, Jacques Olivier Chartier, made a telling contribution throughout the concert, in both solos and choruses.
Alexander Weimann played the keyboards - organ and harpsicord - and directed the singing with extraordinary insight. He and theorbist-lutenist Lucas Harris contributed accompaniments, as well as solos between the vocal pieces.
It was astonishing and refreshing to hear what so small an ensemble could achieve.
Special to The Globe and Mail