BEMF
In Review
2003
Festival Reviews
Revival
of ‘Ariadne’ was worth the wait
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
June 12, 2003
An
unknown opera by an unknown composer is the centerpiece
of the 12th Boston Early Music Festival—and
‘Ariadne,’ by Johann Georg Conradi, is
a winner. It contains nearly three hours of ravishing
music, presented in a splendid staging and cast with
some remarkable singers, supported by superb instrumentalists.
In the title role, Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin
brought down the house in the last act on Tuesday
by singing as fast as Cecilia Bartoli, and with as
much tonal allure.
Robin Linklater’s costumes and painted drops
are intricately ornate and handsome, and a magical
transformation scene at the end won a big hand from
the audience. Lucy Graham’s choreography is
spirited, graceful, amusing, and well-informed, and
Drew Minter’s stage direction is clear, intelligent,
pertinent, and sometimes rowdily funny.
Ellen
Hargis rose to the challenge of a vehement rage aria.
Baritone Jan Kobow was delightful as Pamphilius, an
ancestor of Mozart’s immortal Papageno in “The
Magic Flute.”…The playing of the 30-piece
international orchestra was something to marvel at;
the glistening continuo section of lutes, guitar,
harp, harpsichords, and bassoon was led by festival
codirectors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs,
who were smart enough to know the minute they saw
the score of “Ariadne” that they wouldn’t
be taking a risk.
Shaking
Off 250 Years of Dust at Early Music Festival
Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
June 13, 2003
If
you take a seat at a bar in a downtown Boston restaurant
this weekend, don’t be surprised if you happen
to overhear some people heatedly debating, say, the
influence of Pythagorean theory on musical composition
and instrument design during the Renaissance, as happened
to me the other day. The 12th Boston Early Music Festival
and Exhibition is under way. The city, already a center
of the early-music movement, becomes its mecca when
this acclaimed biennial gathering brings hundreds
more musicians, instrument makers, scholars, and publishers
to town.
Once again the festival…offers an astounding
array of concerts, workshops, lectures, panels, and,
most ambitiously, a historically informed production
of a lesser-known Baroque opera. This year’s
choice was a genuine discovery…
Though
the opera is attracting the most attention, the hub
of the festival remains the exhibition…More
than 100 participants—from major international
publishing houses to dedicated individuals who make
handcrafted replicas of historic instruments—are
exhibition there wares this week. Walk around the
showrooms and you see visitors at every table blowing
into all manner of Baroque flutes, recorders and crumhorns
and comparing violas da gamba and clavichords: Nowhere
do you see a sign reading “Do Not Touch.”
Still,
the Conradi opera is the big news…The arias
and instrumental ritornellos are lyrical and lithe
in the Italian way; the dance music, which pervades
the score, has the harmonic richness and refined elegance
of Lully; the comic scenes come right out of German
folk music.
Ariadne…[is] sung here with clear-toned beauty
by the soprano Karina Gauvin…The festival orchestra
is a crack ensemble of 29 musicians playing period
instruments.
If
it ain’t Baroque
Lloyd
Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix
June, 2003
“Your
eyes will be opened to a world full of beauty, charm,
and adventure,” my fortune cookie predicted,
and the prediction came true even before the curtain
went up on the Boston Early Music Festival’s
sparkling new production of Johann Georg Conradi’s
Die schöne und getreue Ariadne.
Canadian
soprano Karina Gauvin, whose glowing voice, consistency
of pitch, superb German diction, and emotional focus
remained impressive from her opening aria on, blew
the lid off with bravura singing that Cecilia Bartoli
could envy.
This
was the handsomest of the biennial BEMF operas.
All’s
Well that Ends Well in Performances of Two Early Operas
Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal
June 19, 2003
The
biennial Boston Early Music Festival, which aspires
to full period stagings, offered Johann Georg Conradi’s
“Die schöne und getreue Ariadne”…this
[is a] delightful entertainment, an appealing mix
of high dudgeon, low comedy and French dancing.
Karina
Gauvin proved a stunning tragic heroine, singing with
clarity, flexibility and an appealing range of vocal
color. Matthew White, with a light, unforced countertenor
and cascades of Louis XIV curls, made an attractive
Evanthes/Bacchus. Tenor Ian Honeyman portrayed the
duplicitous Theseus with commendably unself-conscious
absurdity, and Dorothy [sic] Mields’s high soprano
made Phaedra a bright foil for Ariadne’s dramatics.
Bernard Deletré and Ellen Hargis were comically
intense as the sisters’ trouble-making royal
parents.
The
period instrument orchestra…was lively and vivid.
The players were clearly immersed in the show: When
not playing, they were watching the stage and grinning
at the jokes.
Revived
opera rises majestically in revived Mahaiwe
Andrew L. Pincus, The Berkshire Eagle
June 23, 2003
Every
now and then somebody exhumes a dusty piece of music
and proclaims it a forgotten masterpiece. Usually
the “masterpiece” receives a few performances
and sinks mercifully back into the oblivion whence
it arose.
In
Johann Georg Conradi’s 1691 opera “Ariadne,”
the Boston Early Music Festival may just have come
across the real thing. Or did the festival’s
production of the long-lost German work only make
it seem that way?
[Ariadne]
has everything operagoers and early-music enthusiasts
expect in baroque opera: spectacle, dancing, furtive
lovers, feuding royalty, flowing melody, glittering
coloratura, striking orchestral effects, clowning,
a god and goddess, satyrs and graces.
The
creamy-voiced Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin commanded
both vocal firepower and human sympathy as the put-upon
Ariadne. The other principals upheld the standard…With
lutenists Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs as
musical directors, the 29-member orchestra delivered
dead-on accuracy and vibrancy; much of the playing
was infused with the spirit of dance. This wasn’t
just early-music performance. It was music-making
at a high level, relishing the discovery of a work
not heard for three centuries.
Violinist,
chamber ensemble elegantly kick off fest
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
June 13, 2003
The
Italian violinist Giuliano Carmignola set the bar
awfully high at the first concert of the Boston…He
has chops and charisma—he looks a little like
the Italian film star Giancarlo Giannini in his prime.
He plays with lustrous sound and drop-dead technique
on a beautiful 17th-century Italian violin…Two
aspects of his playing stood out. One is his command
of different rates of vibrato, which for him is an
infinitely varied expressive device…The other
is his sensitivity to intonation and to the power
of dissonance.
ARTEK
is a Baroque chamber ensemble of flexible membership;
the spotlight was on Boston Baroque violinist Robert
Mealy…[who plays] with imagination, taste, subtlety,
and daring; he certainly had equal partners in Lisa
Terry (gamba), Gwendolyn Toth (harpsichord and organ),
and Daniel Swenberg (lute).
A
virtuoso change of pace at Early Music Festival
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
June 14, 2003
The
indefatigable international all-star Boston Early
Music Festival orchestra took a night off from its
three-hour Baroque opera Thursday night, offering
instead a 2 _-hour program designed to show itself
off. The concert left the audience cheering as if
it were at a sporting event, which in a sense it was.
A cantata by Gottfried Heinrich Stoelzel proved both
majestic and lively…Matthias Maute and Michael
Lynn played a Telemann double concert for recorder
and transverse flute, delighting in the shared agility
and complementary timbres of the instruments. Alexander
Weimann and Kristian Bezuidenhout offered an ingenious
double concerto by C.P.E. Bach for harpsichord and
fortepiano…the performance was delightful.
The
orchestra shone in a glorious suite by Telemann and
in a quick tour of national dances by the same composer.
The dances were led by the irrepressible Slovakian
violinist Milos Valent, and there was an encore of
some Slovakian music that sounded as if it had Gypsy
blood in it.
This brought the house down, but the biggest ovation
went to guest violinist Giuliano Carmignola, who played
a surpervirtuoso concerto by Locatelli…Carmignola
went for broke in the two extended, astounding cadenzas,
responding to fiendish difficulties with wicked awesome
chops.
Music
festival wraps up best year yet
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
June 17, 2003
The
12th Boston Early Music Festival, the best to date,
closed Sunday with a final performance of Conradi’s
“Ariadne”…and revels at Jacob Wirth’s
restaurant. The final Jordan Hall concerts included
performances by three leading ensembles: Tragicomedia,
the Tallis Scholars, and REBEL.
The Tallis Scholars attracted a large crowd, as always,
and generated great enthusiasm…These 10 singers,
many with remarkable voices, performed with the superb
intonation, ensemble, and balance the world has admired
for 30 years. The tonal quality is often gorgeous
too.
Tragicomedia’s
concert traditionally brings lighter repertoire and
a reunion of favorite festival artists. This year’s
“musical pleasure garden” brought many
delights.
REBEL…is
a state-of-the-art early-music ensemble…we hated
for it to end—a good enough metaphor for this
whole edition of the Boston Early Music Festival.
