Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events
His Majesty's Sagbutts & Cornetts/Skidmore
Kilkenny Arts Festival
Monteverdi – 1610 Vespers
MONTEVERDI’S VESPERS of 1610 are problematic. Scholars have failed to establish exactly why the work was written or indeed whether it should even be regarded as a unified piece.
The best guess is that Monteverdi conceived of it as a kind of portfolio, a gesture towards a generalised job application or, as Jeffrey Kurtzman has put it, that he assembled the pieces that make up the Vespers “for the principal purpose of seeking the security of ecclesiastical employment free from the overweening demands of the duke of Mantua and the vagaries, back biting, and jealousies of court politics”.
The music brings with it an extraordinarily wide range of issues, from duplication of material to the potential freedoms created by lack of specific instructions. Performers have long been happy to confront these, and music lovers have been equally enthusiastic to turn out in large numbers for performances.
Friday’s performance, which took place at St Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny as part of the Kilkenny 400 celebrations, was no exception.
Conductor Geoffrey Skidmore presented the work with a compact group of singers, just 10 in all, with the instrumentalists consisting of a small group of strings and the distinctive, brassy instrumental colouring of His Majesty’s Sagbutts Cornetts.
Just one section, the Nisi Dominus, divides the singers into 10 parts, and Skidmore allowed discreet doublings of voices in other movements.
Monteverdi’s Vespers are a celebration of the elemental. They are written in such a way that everything seems to be reduced to its essence. The use of a dotted rhythm or the crossing of vocal lines can become striking musical events and be transformed into gestures with a wow factor.
Monteverdi is like a chef who can present familiar ingredients with a freshness that makes you feel you’re experiencing their true flavour for the first time. And, of course, behind this musical presentation of extraordinary concentration lies a skill of extraordinary sophistication.
As a job application, as well as a piece of music, it is a work of the highest artistry. Friday’s performance was admirably direct. The singing was straightforward, agile and true, if not always as commanding in effect as one might have wished.
It had the merits of first-class choral singing without having the merits of virtuosic solo singing.
The pacing was sure, the blazing grandeur of the instrumentalists effectively deployed. It may at times have had a touch more of English reserve than was really desirable. At the same time, though, it brought one back to one of the fountainheads of western musical wisdom – and that's exactly what this music does. - MICHAEL DERVAN
Love is my Sin
Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny
THERE IS something sublimely fitting about the love sonnet, whose form mirrors its theme. Both the sonnet and love itself abide by predictable patterns and reliable schemes, opening with a rush of promise, measured out in quatrains of longing, jealousy and fear, each ending with a concluding couplet. And yet, for all the merciless regularity of the poem and the heart, every affair feels like a fresh discovery.
Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets stand out among his work, not because they are unnervingly, surprisingly insightful about the relationship between love and mortality or because they position Shakespeare as their central character, but because they give voice to complicated passions.
These, namely, are passions for a young man (sonnets 1-126) and for his mistress (127-152), desires that once saw the sonnets rejected from a 1793 edition of the plays, their homoeroticism met with “an equal mixture of disgust and indignation”, while analysis of their adulterous passions have often made scholastics almost indistinguishable from gossip.
The effect of Peter Brook’s simple staging of some of these sonnets for Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord is, disappointingly, to simplify them. Delivered from cue cards by long-time Brook collaborators Bruce Myers and Natasha Parry, who move deliberately but without apparent purpose across a large Persian rug between sparse furnishings, the poems become literalised.
Parry will often frown, smile or wince, for instance, in response to Myers’s readings, whose sombre interpretations delimit the life of the words.
Such is the hazard of poetry as a performance, where the multiplicity of meanings available to the reader become single interpretations for the listener.
One positive effect is that the collection here is sculpted with the overwhelming edge of mortality, underscored by the performers’ age, the heavy accents of time, wilting and decay, and one neat sequence in which Philippe Vialatte’s accordion matches the end of one sonnet with the sound of a dying breath while announcing another with the wash of the sea shore.
But with a text of such rich complexity, a director of such high standing and a production of such minimalism, little is risked by Love is My Sin– which seems inimical to theatre and contrary to love in all its guises. - PETER CRAWLEY
