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| Desandre, Dunford and Jupiter |
UPDATE: I put this up rather early in the morning and I didn't provide enough context. This concert is by Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Ensemble Jupiter. The first half was devoted to songs and instrumental pieces by John Dowland, the English lutenist and composer, and the second half to music by Henry Purcell.
Since you are not allowed to take photos during the concert and the photos I take afterwards are poor due to the low light levels and since the Festival sends out an email with an excellent photo for every concert (along with homework, sometimes), I'm just going to use these excellent photos.
In contrast to the Don Giovanni performance where I was barely qualified to attend the performance, let alone comment on it, I am highly qualified to comment on this performance. I not only know this repertoire, I have been performing it for nearly fifty years, longer, that is, than the artists on stage last night. But not nearly as well, let me hasten to add!
I have to make one technical comment up front: I am troubled by Thomas Dunford's practice of crossing his legs while he plays. He can certainly do this, with great success, and he uses a fabric strap to make it more stable. But the problem is, I am pretty sure that in the long term, i.e. decades from now, it may give him a bad case of sciatica. I have some sciatica in my left leg from using a foot rest to play guitar with, which is why I changed to a guitar rest that allows me to have both feet flat on the floor. About half of the younger guitarists these days are doing the same. But on to the concert.
The Canto Lirico series consists of three concerts, this one and two others with different artists later in August with vocal repertoire. The title of this program is Songs of Passion and from the very first song, an irony was revealed. "Come again: sweet love doth now invite" from The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of 1597 by John Dowland is a song I know well. In my score library at home is my transcription for guitar that I made some fifty years ago. The thing about Elizabethan texts is that they often reveal a bawdy side and that is especially true of this song. I remember being shocked to discover, on reading an excellent book titled Shakespeare's Bawdy by Eric Partridge, that virtually everything the Nurse says in Romeo and Juliet is actually a sexual pun.
Here is the first verse of "Come again: sweet love doth now invite"
Come again: sweet love doth now invite,
Thy graces, that refrain,
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.
Just read literally, those are rather odd lyrics. But to Elizabethans everything was quite clear. "Come again" is a reference to orgasm and the line "To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die" is simply how you get there! In Elizabethan slang, "to die" is to have an orgasm. Now that verse makes a great deal more sense. Especially when you notice that the line ending in "to die" is a rising sequence. After I discovered Shakespeare's Bawdy I went through a number of songs by Dowland and others and discovered a host of sexual references. Oh, and if you want to be really accurate, you have to pronounce "sympathy" to rhyme with "die".
But, alas, none of this came across in the performance last night. The tempo of the song was too fast and the eroticism of the words and their musical setting was just not there. In addition, much as I love Lea Desandre, she is not at her best with English pronunciation. The performance had real strengths, of course. They did some interesting variations--for one verse, the strings (two violins, viola, viola da gamba and double bass) joined in singing. The Dowland Ayres are published with vocal and string parts as well as lute accompaniment, so you have various performance options. They also played with different tempi for some verses. All in all it was a very accomplished performance that, alas, missed the boat as to what the song was actually about. Lea Desandre is a terrific singer, but she does not do bawdy well.
After that, I'm afraid, I dozed off for a lot of the first half. The second half was all Purcell and they were much more at home with this music. Desandre does lament very well and the half ended with "Thy hand Belinda" and "When I am laid in earth" from Dido and Aeneas. Much though we loved to make sexual puns on those lyrics in first year music history they are not actually bawdy!
The audience in Salzburg loved the concert and demanded an encore which turned out to be a song composed by lutenist and director Thomas Dunford--a song, in English about how we are all drops in the ocean. It was well-received by the audience and the performers returned for numerous bows. It rather sounded to me like French pop music, but hey...
Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and Ensemble Jupiter are really outstanding musicians and I am in awe of their facility with style and ornamentation. Dunford in particular is terrific at ripping off garlands of divisions on the lute and Desandre can do trills and graces till the cows come home. Their real center of gravity is in French and Italian music, I feel, and they are less at home with English music and especially John Dowland. They don't do somber terribly well.
But I was led to reflect on my own career: the truth is that these folks know how to read a room and give an audience just what they want to hear. And that was something that I was a lot less good at!
Some photos:
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| Just before the concert, Thomas Dunford popped out to check his tuning |
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| Acknowledging the very enthusiastic applause |
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| The three concert halls on the Karajan-platz all back on the sheer rock of the Mönchsberg |
6 comments:
I assume there were few native English speakers in the audience. English and German sort of work both ways but every other Euro language singer is far from idiomatic or knowledgeable in English. English speakers doing French or Russian are mostly poor. German-Italian is generally poor. This was the argument for performing opera in the language of the audience with more native speakers but that seems to have failed as a movement. There is sort of a Euro polyglot pronunciation that is prevalent now; not at all idiomatic in anything but not so bad you flee the hall.
The language choices are interesting at the Salzburg Festival. Before every concert there is a recorded announcement about shutting off your cellphone that is in German and repeated in English. All the program notes are in German and English and all the ushers speak English. The French language is completely ignored!
Yes, English-speaking singers seem to do ok with German and the pure vowels of Italian are not too hard. But learning to sing in French is more of a challenge. And it seems to go both ways as Lea Desandre seemed to struggle with her English pronunciation. I have never heard Dowland performed in any language other than English. The problem in this concert was the consonants--they were just poorly articulated.
I have noticed that in general women singers don't seem quite as able to deliver consonants as clearly as men. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was the best of all time: listening to him sing, in whatever language, you could not only write down every syllable, but every letter!
The issue of singing faint consonants is due to the register difference. Consonants have more initial transient noise and that is accentuated with lower notes that have many audible overtones. Also the slower action in producing lower midrange and bass notes creates more time spread for the transients. Listen to a clarinet traveling from the chalumeau region to the upper octaves. Producing clear transients in upper treble requires special effort and generally more separation of sounds.
Yes, one can hear the difference between the articulation of consonants between male and female voices. But some women singers seem to be get a bit more across.
Don't listen to Joan Sutherland then!
I think Dawn Upshaw articulates quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT23iCBnDkU
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