Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
A masterpiece within a masterpiece
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| Boston Baroque |
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Boston Baroque
Martin Pearlman, Music Director
Boston Baroque continues New York’s 400th- birthday celebration of the Monteverdi Vespers with an interpretation that has won standing ovations in Boston, Los Angeles, and at the Ravinia and Tanglewood Festivals. With its extraordinary beauty and scale, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine will provide a dramatic setting for the Vespers, which, in its own time, brilliantly exploited the spatial and acoustical possibilities of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice.
“The Vespers is a work of extraordinary emotional power,” says music director Martin Pearlman, “astonishing for the grandeur of its conception and the opulence of its sound. No other surviving work from that period is written on such a scale, combining the grandest of public music with the most intimate of solo songs.
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| Martin Pearlman |
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“For Boston Baroque’s return to New York City, I was looking for an extraordinary venue to reflect the scale and grandeur of the Vespers, and its profound intimacy as well. I found that in St. John the Divine—but the challenge was to make it work acoustically for a Baroque ensemble. After an initial visit to the Cathedral in which we tried out instruments and voices in various placements, we began to see that we could carve out an intimate performance area in which the sound will be warm, clear and big enough without amplification. This acoustical ‘sweet spot’ is almost entirely within the area that they call the Great Crossing, and will hold an audience of just 700, plus a platform for the performers. The lighting design will add to the sense of ‘intimacy within grandeur’ that seems perfect for the Vespers.”
Boston Baroque’s 1998 recording of the Vespers received a Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance. Vocal soloists for the New York performance are Mary Wilson and Kristen Watson, sopranos; Derek Chester, Aaron Sheehan and Lawrence Jones, tenors; and Sumner Thompson and Donald Wilkinson, baritones.
The March 6 performance is a co-production with Boston University’s Incite Arts Festival. Boston Baroque is the resident ensemble for BU’s Historical Performance Program, where Pearlman and his colleagues are helping to train the next generation of period-instrument performers.
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DATE & TIME:
Saturday, March 6, 2010
8:00 pm
PLACE:
Cathedral of St. John
the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue
(at 112th Street)
Manhattan
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