THE MONTEVERDI CHOIR AND THE ENGLISH BAROQUE SOLOISTS
at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall
The libretto is entirely scriptural. The first part consists of texts taken exclusively from the Book of Exodus, describing in very broad fashion the Israelites’ enslavement by the Egyptians, their cry to Yahweh, his reply in the person of Moses, and the various plagues that fall upon Egypt. The narrative here is so sketchy that anyone not familiar with the biblical story would be helpless to follow the action. The second part holds together better: in effect it’s a setting of the famous epic poem found in the Book of Deuteronomy known as “The Song of the Sea,” the earliest biblical text concerning the exodus from Egypt; so it incorporates the same story as the first part but tells it in a more triumphant manner.
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Handel originally conceived the work in three parts, like most of his other oratorios, but he never discovered a thoroughly satisfactory way to work this out. In one performing edition he incorporated an earlier funeral anthem (for Queen Caroline) as the prologue, changing its words and calling it “The Lamentations of the Israelites for the Death of Joseph.” He later abandoned that idea, feeling that the transposition didn’t work very well. Gardiner has taken a compromise approach to the problem: he performs only the overture to the funeral anthem, transposing the opening notes of Israel in Egypt’s first recitative to match the tonality of the overture. In effect then the funeral ode’s overture becomes the overture to the entire work.
As the work of individual soloists and of the various sections emerged, many vocal problems were revealed. The altos (oddly, given Gardiner’s claim to be historically informed, he uses men and women–Handel used male altos and boy sopranos) were seated in two groups at opposite ends of the stage, and could not manage to stay together. The bass section had trouble reaching, let alone sustaining, its low notes, particularly in the chorus “And the blast of his nostrils . . .” Soloists were straining to be heard and often screeching to reach notes; one solo soprano, ironically enough, was singing sharp and breathy as she sang, “Thou didst blow a mighty wind”; need I say more?
The second half of the concert began with some private family music from the Wagner household, Siegfried Idyll, which Wagner wrote as a birthday/Christmas present for his wife Cosima the year after her divorce from conductor Hans von Bulow. At the time of the divorce Wagner and Cosima had already had two children together, which von Bulow had recognized as his own, but Cosima finally left von Bulow to marry her longtime lover. Cosima (who was Franz Liszt’s daughter) introduced the custom of presenting household performances of Wagner’s music on his birthday, and then Wagner began elaborating on this idea and wrote a special piece for Cosima, the strains of which awakened her on Christmas morning.
