Magnificently controlled and emotionally powerful singing
At first sight, the Vasari Singers' concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 17 June looked like an Italian 'pops' evening, with the Allegri Miserere, the most famous of Lotti's Crucifixus settings and pieces by Verdi and Puccini. But the Puccini was his tiny Requiem aeternam, written for a commemoration of Verdi's death, the Verdi was his 'enigmatic' Ave Maria, and the two major items were Scarlatti's amazing 10-voice Stabat mater and - a rarity - Pizzetti's Requiem of 1922. A serious event, then, and one which had much to intrigue and delight the audience.
The performance did not start particularly auspiciously: the balance at the start of the Lotti was uneven, suggesting an unwonted nervousness on the part of this normally most expert of choirs. There were moments too in the Allegri when the solo quartet, positioned lontano in the west gallery, sounded slightly uncomfortable (despite some pinging top Cs from Victoria Cross), and this whole piece was rather too earth-bound. But as the first half progressed the confidence of the singers took flight and by the end of the second half the singing was magnificently controlled and emotionally powerful.
The Scarlatti Stabat mater is a piece far too rarely heard. Here it had a pacey, highly characterised reading with some fine singing from soloists and chorus. The quieter, more reflective passages were often beautifully shaped, each dissonance telling, and some of the speeds towards the end of the piece were breathtaking but not a note seemed out of place - even if some of the words got lost in the process. The virtuoso Inflammatus was suitably fiery, and the closing Amen sparkled and crackled with exuberance. The piece demands singers who can do justice to its ambitious technical demands: the choir is divided into ten in this piece, with four separate soprano parts, but at no point did the texture seem thin, even if the solo voices - confident and stylish though they were - could sometimes have done with a slightly weightier tone. The continuo group, members of La Serenissima, were supportive and responsive throughout.
The Vasari Singers have begun to make a name for finding and performing
little-known masterpieces (like the Dupré De profundis and La France au
Calvaire that feature on two of their recent CDs). The Pizzetti Requiem is
even less frequently performed than the Scarlatti, but deserves much more popularity.
There are extraordinary things in this work: amazing unaccompanied choral textures,
effective use of plainsong or quasi-plainsong, and an emotional progression that is deeply
satisfying. The programme notes referred to the structural imbalance of the music but in
fact the composer (and his interpreters on this occasion, guided in masterly fashion by
Jeremy Backhouse) got it absolutely right. The short 'Agnus Dei' was a perfect
foil to the longer, more complex movements that precede it, and the closing 'Libera me'
with its three-fold repetition of a simple cadence, the last one fading to a magical
pianissimo, left tears in the eyes. The Vasari Singers are able to get inside music like
this, finding its soul and laying it bare in front of the listener. The technical
difficulty of singing a demanding unaccompanied piece such as this had no terrors for
them: their pacing was confident and their grasp of the harmonic twists and turns secure
(even in the awkward, Bruckner-like enharmonic shifts in the 'Benedictus'). The
choir's quality of sound throughout was marvellous, whether in the spacious twelve-part
texture at the start of the 'Sanctus' or the spare counterpoint of the 'Dies
irae'. The stillness in the church at the end was testimony to the quality of this
piece, and to the eloquence of this fine performance of it.
Howard Fenton © 2003