Carissimi Oratorios

If you're in your fifties or older and yearn to feel younger, there's no surer way to create the illusion than to attend an "Early Music" concert -- Baroque, Renaissance, or Medieval -- almost anywhere in the USA. You'll be buoyed not only by the music but also by the 'sea of white and grey' heads around you. Most of the better known American ensembles have 'plateaued' at the level of competency they reached several decades ago and, to be painfully honest, I fear they just don't match the standards of current Italian, French, and German performers. The Europeans, of course, still feature quite a few Americans in their consorts; the 'talent drain' isn't so hard to explain, is it? There's money and there's an appreciative audience, with some actuarial prospects for an lengthy career based on the relative youthfulness of their fans.

But Canada - so thinly populated Canada - is a different story. Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver are all thriving centers of historically informed performance, with ensembles every bit as virtuosic as the Europeans. "Les Voix Baroques" is such an ensemble. The majority of the singers and instrumentalists on this recording are Canadians by birth or long residence. Director/countertenor Matthew White, born in 1973, got his earliest vocal training in Ottawa as a member of the St Matthews's Men and Boys Choir. Sopranos Suzie LeBlanc and Catherine Webster are in demand for performances around the world but have remained closely involved with Canadian ensembles such as Tafelmusik and Le Nouvel Opera, and with music education at the Conservatory of Montreal and Early Music vancouver. This 2009 performance of four oratorios by Giacomo Carissimi is, to my ears, their finest recording to date, one that deserves easily to be my "pick of the month" for April 2010. I have two other very artful recordings of the oratorio Jonas, by Consortium Carissimi and by conductor Diego Fasolis, but this one is superior to both, especially in the sections sung by the seven soloists as a chorus.

And I have two other versions of Jephte, a fine recording by Consortium Carissimi and an ancient LP conducted by Hermann Scherchen. There's little difference of quality bewteen the two recent recordings - both are fine - but the Scherchen performance, done in the 1950s I believe, is of antiquarian interest only. Scherchen deserves all possible honor for having attempted to introduce Carissimi to modern audiences. When I first heard his LP, I remember that I was both excited and unconvinced. Having at that time no living performance tradition for early baroque, Scherchen quite properly relied on the performance tradition he knew, that of 19th C Romanticism. The result sounded, or at least sounds now, more like Mahler than like a successor to Monteverdi. To be blunt, it's plumb awful. But Scherchen and others launched the development of the living performance tradition that invigorates this decade's recordings of 17th C music. The goal of 'historically informed performance' -- at least as I understand it -- was never to recreate 'authentic' museum pieces, but rather precisely to use all scholarly resources and musical instincts to evolve a plausible standard of performance. That job, I maintain, has been accomplished, and this CD is marvelous evidence.

Giacomo Carissimi, the son of a cobbler born in 1605 in a village near Roma, was the quintessential composer of the Roman Counter-Reformation. He spent nearly all his working life, until 1674, in Rome, refusing plum jobs elsewhere, composing an oeuvre entirely of music for religious institutions; a dozen or more masses, 200-some motets, 130 cantatas, and 15 oratorios have survived, representing probably a mere fraction of his life work. He led apparently a quiet, frugal, pious life. Aside from music, he gathered some wealth as a money lender, which money he bequeathed entirely to his clerical employers for the training of young singers. His music has an astonishing emotional intensity, a brightness and vivacity that makes it immediately appealing. His 'formula' for oratorios was simple. The text, usually in Latin, is supreme and must be sung both expressively and intelligibly. One of the ironies of the Counter-Reformation, of course, is that the formulae of music and visual arts were conceived to be persuasive to the 'commoners' yet tasteful and artful enough to satisfy the aristocratic intelligentsia, those who could have understood Carissimi's latin texts on hearing them. But fear not! The music is so vigorously affective that the merest outline of the text will be sufficient. The four oratorios on this CD retell familiar stories from the Old Testament, of Jonah, Jephte, Job, and Ezechial. Translations are included in the notes, in English and French. Musically, Carissimi was the inheritor of Monteverdi's "Second Practice", of vocal monody accompanied by basso continuo and occasional obbligato instruments. Polyphony is limited, in Carissimi, to climactic, celebratory choruses. Even the most poignant laments have a deft, sprightly elegance in Carissimi's music. Very few composers have ever written such seemingly simple music with such profound melodic subtlety.

Vocal group Les Voix Baroques is an early music ensemble that specializes in performing music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Their most recent release is a cd of oratorios on the ATMA Classique label of one the most noted composers in this genre, Giacomo Carissimi.

Oratorios were first composed during the Counter-Reformation and were religious in nature. They are similar to operas of that time, but the texts used in oratories are sacred in nature and were performed without opera style staging.

The oratorios included on this cd are Jonas, Jephte, Ezechia , and Job. The performances by Les Voix Barqoues, led by director Matthew White, are quite beautifully sung. All of the solos are sung with a vocal purity that allows the sacred texts to shine and the same attention is applied to the choruses as well. The blend between the vocalists and instrumentalists is seamless which adds to the overall beauty of the cd. This recording is a first rate example of early music at its finest.

Carissimi oratorios were rare gems, even in their own time, so it's not surprising most people today haven't heard of them.

They should hear. This recording is a way for them to hear them at their best.

When we think of baroque oratorios, we tend to think of huge productions by Handel or Bach. We also tend to think of the recitative portions as bland but necessary transitions to the real music of arias and chorales.

These Carissimi pieces are chamber oratorios. No big choruses, no hoopla, just sweet, mournful, meditative threads of gold. The recitative portions, essential parts of these short narratives, remain as beautiful as the rest of the music. It is a compositional wonder that this can be done.

I am quickly becoming a rabid fan of the performances of Matthew White and Les Voix Baroques, after just a couple of recordings. The musicianship and the production values are absolutely world class. They are an apt rendering of these obscure, compact beauties, and I found myself getting lost in their magical web with repeated listenings.

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