The Observer - 25.08.2019

38

The Observer

25.08.19

Critics

Classical

Classical music on CD,

on air and online

 Little is known

about the Italian

composer

Amadio Freddi

(c1580-1634).

Th e Gonzaga Band ’s recording

of his Vespers (1616) (Resonus),

together with detailed liner notes

by the ensemble’s director and

cornett player, Jamie Savan,

may be the most extensive

material yet available.

As a boy and young man, Freddi

was a professional singer in the

basilica of S Antonio in Padua. After

working in Treviso, then Vicenza,

he returned to Padua to the top job

of maestro di cappella. Whether or

not he knew Monteverdi’s famous

version of the Vespers, Freddi’s

music has its own virtues. Less

brilliant in impact, it has clear, light

textures with unusual voice-

instrument combinations. Th e

disc also included short works by

some of Freddi’s contemporaries,

including Giovanni Gabrieli.

Th is kind of loving scholarship,

combined with excellent

performance by the Gonzaga

Band’s six singers and three

instrumentalists, contributes

to our ever-growing picture of

music in the late Renaissance and

early baroque.

 A prince, a count,

a composer, a

murderer: Freddi’s

contemporary,

Carlo Gesualdo

(1566-1613), is among the most

famous cultural fi gures of the

era. Th e broad outlines of his life

are distracting, yet even without

the lurid detail (he murdered his

wife and her lover in fl agrante),

he stands out as a radical

experimentalist. Where Freddi’s

music has a limpid brightness,

Gesualdo’s is dark, chromatic,

anguished, obsessed not with

Marian redemption but with

sorrow and death.

Th e vocal ensemble Exaudi ,

directed by James Weeks,

has selected works from

the Fifth and Sixth Books of

Madrigali for a superb new

disc (Winter & Winter). Th ey

sing with impeccable defi nition

and accuracy, letting each

dissonance burn and scorch until

the ear longs for release.

 In a recent edition of Radio 3’s

Early Music Show , Lucie Skeaping

introduced another unfamiliar

Renaissance composer, the

16th-century Frenchman Claude

Le Jeune, a Huguenot who

got entangled in the religious

wars between Catholics and

Protestants. Catch up online.

Fiona Maddocks

Home

listening

Missy Mazzoli’s

opera based on

Lars von Trier’s

fi lm Breaking the

Waves triumphs

in its European

premiere

The things we do for love

to add was immediately clear.

Stripped of the lowering skies

and desolate outdoors of the fi lm,

the action gained in intimacy and

psychological depth. The misogyny

of the fi lm recedes, still part of

the landscape – especially in the

dozen-strong male voice chorus of

church elders – but no longer the

foreground. The central character

is Bess McNeill , who marries Jan

Nyman , an oil-rig worker who is

then disabled in an accident. He asks

her to sleep with other men to keep

their love, or his fantasies, alive, with

shocking consequence.

Adhering closely to the original,

the opera is long, harrowing and

unblinking, yet kept buoyant and

absorbing by Mazzoli’s fl uid score.

Written for large chamber ensemble

(soloists from the orchestra of

There has to be an imperative

for translating fi lm into opera. It

happens often enough. Take Olga

Neuwirth’s Lost Highway or Thomas

Adès’s The Exterminating Angel or

Nico Muhly’s Marnie. When the

idea of reworking Lars von Trier ’s

Breaking the Waves ( 1996 ) fi rst

arose, the American composer

Missy Mazzoli said “absolutely

‘Outstanding’: Sydney Mancasola (Bess McNeill),

Duncan Rock (Jan Nyman) and company in Breaking

the Waves. Photograph by Murdo MacLeod

not”. Anyone who has seen this

epic of phenomenal gloom, in

which Scottish Calvinism, physical

paralysis and graphic sexuality join

in sacrifi cial congress, might reckon

her instinct wise. The suggestion

came from her librettist, the

evidently persuasive Royce Vavrek.

The three-act, full-length opera

had its fi rst performance at Opera

Philadelphia in 2016.

On Wednesday, Edinburgh

international festival presented

the European premiere , in a new

production by Scottish Opera and

Opera Ventures, imaginatively

directed by Bristol Old Vic’s

Tom Morris and, with equal

prowess, conducted by Scottish

Opera’s music director, Stuart

Stratford. That Mazzoli and

Vavrek had something remarkable

Breaking the Waves

King’s theatre, Edinburgh

Eugene Onegin

Festival theatre, Edinburgh

Fiona

Maddocks