Magnificat Announces 2008-2009 Season

Magnificat is proud to announce our 17th Season of concerts in the Bay Area. Once again, Magnificat offers our audiences the opportunity to experience rarely-heard masterpieces of the Early Baroque with programs that feature music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Giovanni Antonio Rigatti, Heinrich Schütz, and Alessandro Scarlatti.

The season begins on the weekend of October 3-5, 2008 with performances of two divertissements by Charpentier: Les Plaisirs de Versailles and La Couronne des Fleurs. Magnificat has become the premiere interpreter of Charpentier’s music in the Bay Area, exploring new gems from the composer’s notebooks almost every season.

Both works on the program were composed for the ensemble of Mlle de Guise, in whose household Charpentier lived and worked after returning from his studies in Rome with Carissimi. Les Plaisirs de Versailles was inspired by the soirées that Louis XIV held at Versailles in 1682, and it's four scenes celbrates the pleasures of the royal residence with charm and humor. The singers, taking on the roles of “Music”, “Conversation”, “Games, and “Festivities”, contribute to the amusement of the Sun King.

The pastorale La Couronne des Fleurs is an adaptation of the original Prologue to La Malade Imaginaire (1673), which Charpentier arranged for the singers of Mlle de Guise in the mid-1680s. In fact, of the 19 movements only 2 are borrowed (and are extensively recomposed); the rest of the opera is entirely original (though the text is wholly by Molière). Magnificat will perform from editions prepared by Charpentier scholar John Powell.��

The concerts will be Friday, October 3 at 8:00 pm, First Lutheran Church, Palo Alto; Saturday October 4 at 8:00 pm, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley; and Sunday October 5 at 4:00 pm, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco.

Magnificat’s season continues with a program of Vespers music for Christmas by Rigatti on the weekend on December 5-7, 2008. Before his untimely death in 1648, Rigatti was already regarded as one of the most talented Italian composers to emerge from the generation after Monteverdi. Rigatti was choirmaster at Udine Cathedral in 1635-7, and later a priest in Venice, singing at St Mark's and teaching singing at one of the Venetian conservatories; in 1646 he directed music for the Patriarch of Venice.

In 1640 and 1641, the Venetian printer Bartolomeo Magni published two magnificent collections of music for Mass and Vespers: Selva morale e spirituale by the venerable Monteverdi and Messa e Salmi by the 23 year old Rigatti. Both collections were dedicated to Hapsburg royalty and both embodied the concertato style, most favored at the time, in which large musical structures are built from a variety of vocal/instrumental combinations. Rigatti’s music is characterized by frequent changes of meter and tempo, virtuso passages for voices and instruments alike, and a striking sensitivity to text and emotion.

The concerts will be Friday, December 5 at 8:00 pm, First Lutheran Church, Palo Alto; Saturday December 6 at 8:00 pm, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley; and Sunday December 7 at 4:00 pm, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco.

On the weekend of February 6-8, 2009, Magnificat will return to the music of Heinrich Schütz with a performance of his masterpiece the Musikalisches Exequien. During the bleakest years of the Thirty Years War, Schütz received a commission from a wealthy nobleman to set texts that had been carved onto the patron’s pewter casket. The work was to be performed at the nobleman’s funeral. Schütz the disparate texts, drawn from Scripture and Lutheran chorales, and formed them into a extraordinary three part Requiem.

Recognizing the occasional nature of the composition, Schütz suggested that the work could be used a a paraphrase for the Kyrie and Gloria in a Lutheran Mass for the Feast of Purification. It is in this context that Magnificat will perform Schütz’s work, incorporating chorales, and elements of the liturgy of the Dresden chapel.

The concerts will be Friday, February 6 at 8:00 pm, All Saints Episcopal Church, Palo Alto; Saturday February 7 at 8:00 pm, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley; and Sunday February 8 at 4:00 pm, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco.

The season will conclude with performances of Scarlatti’s Venere, Amore, e Ragione, an allegorical serenata written for the entertainment of the Roman nobility at the turn of the 18th Century. The libretto, written by the Roman poet Silvio Stampiglia, features Cupid, who mediates a timeless debate between Venus and Reason. A showcase for Scarlatti’s unparalleled mastery of melody and lyricism, Venere, Amore, e Ragione is a delightful and colorful masterpiece.

The concerts will be Friday, April 3 at 8:00 pm, First Lutheran Church, Palo Alto; Saturday April 4 at 8:00 pm, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley; and Sunday April 5 at 4:00 pm, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco.

Pre-concert lectures will begin 45 minutes before each performance and are open to all ticket-holders. Subscriptions and single tickets can be purchased here.

San Francisco Classical Voice Review: Funny, Even in Translation

by Thomas Busse

The crack early-music ensemble Magnificat attempted the difficult challenge of performing a Baroque comic opera in concert over the weekend. The form is unlike serious opera or slighter genres such as intermezzos or serenatas, which readily lend themselves to unstaged presentation. Comic opera, with its typically recitative-heavy, slighter music, depends on stage action, comic timing, and the conveyance of complicated and farcical plots, much of which gets lost by singers in dress clothes standing in place.

I am happy to report that Magnificat, under Warren Stewart’s direction, pulled off the challenge magnificently on Saturday in Berkeley’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.

The evening’s dusted-off museum piece was Alessandro Stradella’s penultimate stage work, Il Trespolo Tutore, a charming work from 1679, for which modern performing material was prepared by Michael Burden for performance at New College, Oxford, in 2004, with translations of the recitatives by Simon Dees and of the arias by Dorothy Manly.

The entire era of 17th-century opera is perhaps the largest unexplored territory in both modern performance and modern musicology. Unlike in later time periods, the delineation between aria and recitative was much less strict — “aria” was truer to its original meaning of “song” than were the extravagant da capo productions of, say, Handel. The recitatives tended to be more tuneful, yet they were built on functional harmony much more than the borderline-repertory works we hear now and then from Monteverdi and Cavalli.

Read the Entire Review at The San Francisco Classical Voice

“Un’ opera ridicola, ma bellissima”

“Monday or Tuesday, I will put on stage the third opera, also mine, which is for amusement, because it is a comic opera, but most beautiful, and it is called Il Trespolo; and because here they delight in comic things, I believe it will be an infallible hit.”

So Alessandro Stradella described his opera Il Tespolo Tutore in a letter to one of his patrons in 1679 before performances at the Teatro Falcone in Genoa. Featuring the bumbling character Trespolo from the popular stories of Ricciardi, Stradella’s opera is indeed “ridicola” bordering on slapstick and replete with vulgar language, cross dressing, and sexual innuendo - as popular in the early days of comic opera as today.

The main character, and the butt of endless jokes, is the foolish tutor Trespolo (sung in Magnificat's performances by Peter Becker). “Trespolo” is not a real name – it’s rough meaning is “tripod” – and it was used at the time to mean something rickety that can barely stand up – an apt description of the main protagonist. The remainder of the cast includes Trespolo’s ward Artemisia (Catherine Webster) who is in love with him but too shy to tell him, Nino (José Lemos) who is in love with her and later goes mad, Ciro (Jennifer Ellis-Kampani) his initially crazy brother who also loves Artemisia, Simona (Paul Elliott) their old, foolish nurse, and Despina (Laura Heimes), her shrewd daughter. The instrumental ensemble, typically small as in all of Stradella’s operas, consists of two violins (Rob Diggins and Jolianne von Einem), violoncello (me), theorbo (David Tayler), and harpsichord (Katherine Heater).

Comic opera was still relatively new to Italy at the end of the 1670s. Stradella had composed a comic prologue for O di Cocito oscure deità in 1668, which then traveled with Jacopo Melani’s Il Girello, which Magnificat performed in 1998. He had also composed other comic prologues and intermezzi for the Teatro Tordinona in Rome in the early 70s, so he was quite familiar with the emerging genre of comic opera by the time he wrote Il Trespolo.

Amid the silliness, there are several moments of more serious music, when characters express emotions of despair and rejection over love unrequited. Indeed Villifranchi’s alternate tile for Il Trespolo “Amore è veleno e medicina degl’intelletti” - roughly “Love as medicine and poison for the intellect” - suggests a far more profound subtext within the general inanity of mistaken identity and mis-delivered love letters. Nino’s despair at Artemisia’s rejection provides an opportunity for two mad scenes, which had become a staple of Italian drama by the last quarter of the 17th century. Stradella had already composed such scenes for his earlier opera La forza dell’ amor paterno. The mad scenes were not derived from Ricciardi’s original, but were inserted by the librettist Villifranchi, no doubt to the delight of the Genoese audiences.

The success of Il Trespolo is evidenced by the interest shown by several noblemen in a repeat performance, though it is unclear if any of these proposals came to fruition. In any case Stradella completed only one more opera before his untimely death in 1682.

Magnificat will perform Il Trespolo Tutore on the weekend on April 11-13. For tickets and more information call 800-853-5188 or visit our website order form at www.magnificatbaroque.org.