비발디: 마니피갓, RV 610a - Robert King cond
Album Title: Sacred Music, Vol. 1 Performer: King's Consort Choir, Susan Gritton, Lisa Milne, Lynton Atkinson Composer: Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Sacred Music, Vol. 1 & Magnificat RV 610a BEFORE THE 1920s, the suggestion that Vivaldi had composed a significant corpus of sacred vocal music would have seemed absurd. Almost no church music by him was known to have survived and, since he had never been maestro di cappella at any church, it was difficult to conceive of circumstances in which he would have been asked to provide such music in bulk. True he was a priest, and for that reason would have been familiar with the sacred repertoire and, one supposes, sympathetic to its aesthetic, but that in itself proves nothing. After all, several clerics among composers, Tartini being the most pertinent example, eschewed vocal music altogether. The situation changed only when Vivaldi’s own huge working collection of manuscripts came to light and was acquired for the National Library in Turin. It then became evident that his production of church music was substantial – over fifty works have survived, and the existence of many more is recorded – and that this music was varied, ambitious in form and ｅxpression, and on an artistic level at least equal to that of his concertos. Raised as a violinist, Vivaldi probably wrote little or no church music until the second decade of the eighteenth century. But his travels with his father as a ‘jobbing’ player often placed him in situations where commissions for sacred works might have occurred. Such was the probable origin of the earliest sacred work by him on which a date can be set, the Stabat mater, RV621 (‘RV’ numbers refer to the standard modern catalogue of Vivaldi’s works by Peter Ryom). Vivaldi had visited Brescia in 1711 to play in the patronal festival of the Philippine church, Santa Maria della Pace; among the compositions acquired by this church in the following year and listed in its account book we find the Stabat mater for alto and strings, commissioned for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin, which in 1712 fell on 18 March. In 1713 an event of the greatest importance for Vivaldi’s career occurred. Francesco Gasparini, who was choirmaster at the Pietà, the Venetian charitable institution for foundlings where Vivaldi worked as a violin master and orchestral director, went on a leave from which he never returned.
Until as late as 1719 the Pietà failed to replace him, which meant that Vivaldi (together with a colleague, the singing teacher Pietro Scarpari) found himself invited to take over the main task of the maestro di coro: to supply the singers of the institution with a steady stream of new compositions which would attract a well-heeled congregation to the chapel services and so encourage donations and bequests. For reasons of decorum, mixed church choirs were not acceptable in Catholic Europe at this time, and since the Pietà’s male wards left the institution during adolescence to take up apprenticeships, it had no option but to train and use exclusively female residents as musicians. Remarkably, the choir was laid out exactly as a normal male choir, with tenors and basses in addition to the expected sopranos and altos. The tenor parts, which have rather high compasses, were certainly sung as written; the bass parts were probably also sung much of the time at notated pitch by a handful of women with exceptionally deep voices. In case of difficulty, the bass parts could be transposed up an octave without damage to the harmony, since they were nearly always doubled by instruments. Solo parts, however, were overwhelmingly for high voices: soprano or alto. More than the choir, the orchestra or even the composers of the music, these soloists were the ‘star attraction’ of music-making at the Pietà – their names recorded for posterity in the letters and memoirs of visitors to its chapel. The triumphant solismo of the contemporary opera houses could hardly fail to spill over into the sacred domain. Little of Vivaldi’s church music composed during this period (1713 to 1719) circulated in Italy outside the Pietà’s walls, but some works reached the Habsburg domains in central Europe. A visitor from Bohemia, Balthasar Knapp, acquired a number before his return to Prague in 1717, and his collection appears to have been the nucleus of a modest Vivaldi cult which flourished in such centres as Prague, Osek (in north Bohemia), Brno (in Moravia) and even Breslau (in Silesia). Vivaldi’s sacred works were also known in the capital of Saxony, Dresden, where the Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka took a few pieces into his extensive collection of church music. The surviving works from this ‘first’ period account for just under half of the total. A similar number date from a ‘middle’ period stretching from the mid-1720s to the early 1730s. These include nearly all the compositions laid out for two ensembles (in due cori, as Vivaldi describes this form of setting). Whereas the earlier works are restrained in ｅxpression and generally quite simple in texture, this second group is characterized by flamboyance and contrapuntal ostentation. Many of these works appear to have a connection with the Feast of St Lawrence Martyr on 10 August; Vivaldi may have written them for the convent church of San Lorenzo in Venice (which every year celebrated its patronal festival with great pomp, commissioning music for Mass and Vespers from external composers), or perhaps for the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, whose protector was his Roman patron, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. What is certain is that these works were composed for male voices – the energetic writing for the bass voices in such works as the Dixit Dominus, RV594, would be unthinkable for a female singer. Near the end of his career, in 1739, Vivaldi once again supplied sacred vocal compositions to the Pietà during an interregnum between choirmasters – this time for payment, since he was no longer its employee. only four of the works are extant in complete form today. They exemplify very clearly Vivaldi’s turn, in his last years, to the fashionable galant style cultivated by younger Neapolitan composers, among them Vinci, Leo and Porpora. A clear majority of the surviving works are for solo voice or voices. These include all the motets, introduzioni (an introduzione is a special kind of motet designed to precede the setting of a Psalm or a section of the Mass), hymns and votive antiphons, besides a few of the Psalms themselves. The remaining works are either – in the language of the time – pieno (for choir only) or concertato (for choir with one or more soloists). The supporting orchestra is most often made up merely of strings and continuo, but several of the compositions include wind instruments or obbligato parts. The vitality and idiomatic quality of the instrumental writing in these works is unrivalled in Italian sacred vocal music of the period. A clear distinction must be made between the works on liturgical texts – texts which are unalterable and have their appointed place in the church calendar – and those on freely invented poetic texts (motets and introduzioni). The former mostly employ forms either peculiar to church music (for example, the so-called ‘church aria’ resembling the outer section of a da capo aria) or freely derived from instrumental music, while the latter follow secular models in their adoption of recitative and the da capo aria. A very few movements in the ‘liturgical’ works observe the stile antico based (at some remove, and not without modification) on the polyphonic language of sixteenth-century vocal music. Vivaldi seems to have had great difficulty in reproducing this style, since the specimens contained in his works include several instances of plagiarism. The greatness of Vivaldi’s sacred vocal music resides not in its historical influence, for it seems not to have circulated very widely in his day and (unlike his concertos) not to have initiated any practice copied by other composers, but rather in its consummate artistry and high level of inspiration. If Vivaldi does not quite have the musical gifts of a Bach, a Handel or even a Pergolesi, he has a manner of ｅxpression which is entirely individual and unmistakable, even in his least substantial works. In his best movements one discerns an almost shocking radicalism: a willingness to strip music down to its core and reconstitute it from these simplest elements. There is also a powerful instinct for thematic integration at work; time and again, analysis reveals how the same simple ideas inform each movement of a composite work and impart unity to it. The often unexpectedly subtle word-painting testifies to the thoughtfulness which Vivaldi brought to these compositions. They can accurately be described as the bridge between his imagination as a musician and his conviction as a priest: the point on which all facets of his complex personality converged. MICHAEL TALBOT © 1994
IF ANYONE STILL FELT that they needed to put to rest once and for all the thought that all Vivaldi sounds the same, this first disc in The King’s Consort’s journey through this extraordinary composer’s sacred music would be all the evidence that was required. For volume one we have turned to some of Vivaldi’s most opulent church writing, including three works which require double choir and two separate orchestras alongside two equally splendid works for more conventional orchestral and choral forces. The works for double choir and orchestra allow textures of enormous richness: the instrumental opening of the Kyrie, for instance, is sumptuous, exchanging arpeggios between the orchestras before combining the forces, and those interchanges, spread over a rather longer span in the setting of Lauda, Jerusalem, make for a wonderfully compelling setting which climaxes in a startling ‘Gloria’.
Dixit Dominus, one of Vivaldi’s largest-scale sacred compositions, is a fine work which could have graced the most spectacular Venetian ceremony: the inexorable dotted motor rhythm of the strings in its ‘Donec ponam’ and the sustained choir writing create a magnificent movement, and the exuberant chorus ‘Sicut erat in principio’, with no fewer than sixteen individual contrapuntal lines, creates a wonderfully uplifting close. In between such movements comes much variety: in recording the furious accompaniment to ‘Implebit ruinas’ we could almost see smoke rising from the violin bows (as was the case for the cellos in ‘Fecit potentiam’ in the Magnificat, where the vocal lines graphically depict the ‘scattering of the proud’), and the pyrotechnics required from the solo tenor and bass in ‘Dominus a dextris tuis’ are no less remarkable. At the other end of the scale come inimitable moments of gentle Vivaldi, including the delicious soprano duet ‘Esurientes’ in the Magnificat, the delightful writing for oboes, strings and three-part choir in ‘Sicut locutus est’ and the peaceful alto solo ‘De torrente in via’ from the Dixit Dominus. Everywhere Vivaldi shows great skill writing for both voices and instruments. This is wonderfully approachable music for both performers and listeners, and yet music which carries much more below the surface than has often been credited to the composer. Scholars and performers have come up with many different solutions for performing Vivaldi’s sacred music. At performances in the Pietà there may well only have been girls taking part, and recent solutions to this problem (Vivaldi writes lines for tenors and basses as well as sopranos and altos) have sometimes been novel, even transposing the tenor and bass lines up an octave (and not worrying too much about the harmonic inversions and the consecutive octaves that sometimes ensue!). We have not tried to recreate a performance at Venice’s most famous orphanage for girls. Instead we have imagined a performance on a large ceremonial occasion in one of the city’s largest churches, scaling our forces and choosing our recording venue accordingly. There is plenty of evidence that Vivaldi’s music was performed on major civic occasions. We have imagined our audience to be sitting in the best seats in the main body of the church, where the immediacy of orchestras and choirs on both the left and the right of the conductor would be apparent to the listener. Away from the Pietà an all-male choir would have been normal and in hand-picking our singers we have tried to create the bright boys’ sound that we imagine fourteen-year-old Venetian trebles would have made in the eighteenth century, backing them with an equally bright, Italianate adult section. Combined with rich orchestral textures Vivaldi’s splendid music shines luxuriously. ROBERT KING © 1994
1–9 MAGNIFICAT The earliest version of Vivaldi’s Magnificat in G minor was probably written for the Pietà around 1715 and is preserved in a copy made for the Cistercian monastery of Osek fairly soon afterwards. In the 1720s Vivaldi revised it, rewriting the tenor and bass parts in some places to make them more suited to male voices and adding a pair of oboes. one movement, the terzet ‘Sicut locutus est’, was considerably expanded in order to give the oboes a chance to appear as obbligato instruments. Vivaldi wrote instructions on the score of this second version (RV610) which assigned each movement to either (or both) of the cori. However, the work remains absolutely ‘monochoral’ in its musical conception and there is little to be gained in using two cori. The Magnificat is notable for its conciseness. As it is a setting of the canticle sung at every Vesper service, it was inevitably destined to be repeated time after time, and this is perhaps the reason why Vivaldi exercised such restraint. It opens – strikingly – with the favourite chromatic passage set to the first verse. There follows an ‘aria a tre’, a movement in which the text of each of the three succeeding verses is sung by a different voice. Even the choir makes a brief appearance, repeating the alto’s ‘omnes’ (‘all’) with punning effect. This is followed by the most extended and memorable of all the movements, a chorus on the verse beginning ‘Et misericordia eius’. Here Vivaldi expresses great poignancy through chromaticism and ‘anguished’ melodic intervals such as the major seventh. The next two verses are set as a pair of choral movements: ‘Fecit potentiam’ dramatically demonstrates the Lord’s strength over a splendidly busy bass line, and the mighty are put down and the humble exalted in graphic fashion. Next, to illustrate the filling of the ‘hungry with good things’, Vivaldi inserts a charming duet for sopranos supported by a prominent ostinato figure in the bass. The ‘Suscepit Israel’ is a brief interlude, leading to the surprisingly cheerful ‘Sicut locutus est’ terzet – not quite the solemn homage to the biblical forefathers which this verse usually produces. The Doxology begins with a condensed version of the work’s opening bars (the punning possibilities of the words ‘As it was in the beginning’ are rarely overlooked!), followed by a vigorous double fugue in traditional style.
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