BEMF In Review

2005 FESTIVAL REVIEWS

Enthusiasts to flock to upcoming Boston Early Music Festival
George W. Harper, The Patriot Ledger
June 4, 2005

Winning three out of the past four Super Bowls? That’s great. Winning the World Series after a drought of 86 years? That’s amazing. But a dozen times since 1981 Boston has played host to the early-music equivalent of the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup and the NBA playoffs all rolled into one. The 13th biennial Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) starts June 13 and continues through June 19. During those seven days it will draw performers, instrument makers and music lovers like iron filings to a magnet.

Enthusiasts will come from across the United States and around the world to hear terrific performers, singers as well as instrumentalists, soloists and ensembles, presenting superb programs of music dating from as early as the 10th century and as late as the 19th. They’ll come to admire and perhaps to purchase beautiful period instruments by builders like the Friedrich von Huene Workshop of Brookline, and Frank Hubbard Harpsichords of Framingham. Perhaps most of all, they’ll come to share the city for a week with thousands of like-minded enthusiasts.

Though concerts big and small will be presented morning, noon and night in venues across the area, the magnetic field is bound to be strongest around the festival’s centerpiece, usually a lavish production of a baroque opera that may not have been heard since its premiere. This year’s featured work is “Boris Goudenow,” by Johann Mattheson, a mentor and friendly rival of the young George Frideric Handel. Even Mattheson never heard this opera performed, and its score was thought to have been lost during World War II.

The opera’s title may ring a bell. In the 19th century Modest Mussorgsky composed an opera, “Boris Godunov,” with the same basic cast of characters drawn from 16th-century Russian history. One difference is that Mussorgsky’s opera is already a repertory staple. Another is that Mussorgsky’s is a tragedy with corpses aplenty, while Mattheson’s is a lighter work with loads of buffoonery and several romances…

If you’re not into opera, there’s still lots of music to choose from on the BEMF menu. Among those offering major programs are the Sequentia Ensemble for Medieval Music, directed by Benjamin Bagby, on Thursday night, the legendary Boston Camerata, directed by Joel Cohen, on Saturday night, and the King’s Noyse, directed by David Douglass, on Sunday afternoon.

The BEMF Orchestra will also present two concerts, one of them reprising highlights of previous BEMF opera productions and the other offering five concertos as well as the world premiere of a Magnificat by Mattheson…Add the midday and afternoon concerts, “fringe concerts” by local performers piggybacking on the BEMF, symposia and lectures, masterclasses and workshops, and the mind boggles.

One of the festival’s most important elements is the BEMF Exhibition, which gives instrument makers a chance to stuff their stuff before an admiring crowd.

Summer festivals begin to heat up
David Grundy, The Gainesville Sun
June 2-8, 2005

And then there’s a personal favorite, the Boston Early Music Festival, a biennial event that happens this year from June 13 to 19.

The featured event in a very busy schedule of musical attractions is a performance of the 1710 opera by Johann Mattheson, “Boris Goudenow.” Perhaps because of personal conflicts (Mattheson was also a singer and critic in Hamburg), the work was never staged there, making this performance a world premiere…

The BEMF has secured a significant position in the global music scene. The major work at the previous festival, “Conradi’s Ariadne,” is being released on CD on the CPO label.

The major events at the BEMF take place at 5, 8 and 11 p.m. There is also an extensive “fringe concert” line-up, with more than 50 different ensembles from all over the country, with starting times from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m….I don’t see how anyone into great music could pass this up.

Lively music fest production certain not to “Boris”
Keith Powers, The Boston Herald
Thursday, June 16, 2005

What’s 300 years old and brand-new at the same time? Boston Early Music Festival’s production of Johann Mattheson’s “Boris Goudenow,” which got its world premiere Tuesday evening at the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

No, it’s not that “Boris,” the Mussorgsky opera that flirts with the edges of the standard repertory. This opera was written in 1710, much closer to the era of the historical Boris, who was Russia’s first people’s champion in the early 17th century….

BEMF operas set the gold standard for sophistication, elegance and artistic sensibility. This is not “stand in the middle of the stage and bellow” opera; music, movement and costume are nearly equal partners in this elaborate production, which was co-directed by Lucy Graham and Nils Niemann. And the variety of settings and players—duos, trios, even a sextet, with soloists, male, female and child choruses, and sundry dancers—kept the stage constantly whirling.

Too many fine singers graced this production to give credit to everyone. Of the half-dozen making BEMF debuts, Catherine Webster and Colin Balzer made a fetching couple vocally and visually. Vadim Kravets sang the lead with forceful distinction.

The most exceptional music came from the pit. O’Dette and Stubbs occasionally left off their lutes and rose to conduct more complex scenes. Concertmaster Robert Mealy played more music than anyone onstage or off, every measure of it with erudition and compelling energy.

A Feast of Early Music With Opera as the Entrée
Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
Saturday, June 18, 2005

For fans and performers of early music, [Boston] is a paradise for a week every other June, when the Boston Early Music Festival sets up its combination concert marathon and trade show. The festival offers performances every night between 5 and midnight. The centerpiece is always a lavishly produced Baroque opera—this year’s is Johann Mattheson’s long-lost “Boris Goudenow”—but concerts by imported ensembles and soloists, and by the festival’s period instrument orchestra, are also a strong draw.

Added to this is a vast slate of fringe events, mostly concerts by young ensembles and soloists. These get under way well before noon and run, often three or four competing for attention, all through the day. And then there’s the exhibition, the trade show part of the endeavor, which is a wonderland for anyone shopping for instruments, scores, scholarly journals, books or CD’s.

Getting “Boris Goudenow” onto the schedule was a coup for the festival’s directors, the lutenists Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs…the fascination with “Boris” has partly to do with its status as a precursor (and as it turns out, a prequel) to Mussorgsky’s similarly named opera, and partly with Mattheson’s status as a forgotten composer worthy of interest….

It is packed with beautifully shaped arias, lovely ensembles and fantastic orchestral writing. Its real charm, though, Is its odd cosmopolitanism. The libretto, by Mattheson, is mostly in German, but switches to Italian for lovelorn arias. And tempering the Italian and northern German musical accents is a hefty French influence, evident in the abundant dance music.

The festival rounded up a fine list of early music singers to fill the huge cast. In the Thursday evening performance at the Cutler Majestic Theater at Emerson College, Ellen Hargis brought dignity, grace and vocal subtlety to her portrayal of Irina. Nell Snaidas as Olga (a princess) and Catherine Webster as Axinia (Boris’s daughter) also sang their extensive arias with considerable character. Vadim Kravets, in the title role, sang with an appropriate heft and gravity, and Colin Balzer as Gavust (a foreign prince) was the embodiment of courtliness, and vocally strong as well. Anna Watkins’s costumes were an appropriate mixture of Russian antiquity (long robes, big fur hats) for the local courtiers and Western European decorativeness for the handful of foreigners. The sets, by David Cockayne, were simple and attractive, and the stage direction, by Lucy Graham (who also did the choreography) and Nils Niemann, was inventive and often amusing….

Not to be overlooked amid all this was the magnificent period instrument band that Mr. O’Dette and Mr. Stubbs assembled and led. The sound of the strings, woodwinds and brass is polished, focused and perfectly tuned, but it also retains the gamey timbres and occasional buzz and rasp that are part of the appeal of period instruments. On Wednesday, the orchestra brought these qualities to bear on a concert at Jordan Hall that included a vividly played suite from Lully’s “Thésée,” as well as explosively dramatic accounts, with the soprano Karina Gauvin, of scenes from Conradi’s “Schöene und Getreue Ariadne.”

The program also included star turns by Ms. Hargis (a heart-rending performances of “Lasciate Averno,” from Luigi Rossi’s “Orfeo”) and for Marek Rzepka, Ms. Snaidas and Brenna Wells, the soloists with Ms. Hargis in a Mattheson wedding serenade, “Die Keusche Liebe.” And the festival offered a sly comment on the Mattheson-Handel rivalry by including virtually identical arias from Mattheson’s “Porsenna” (1702) and Handel’s “Agrippina” (1709).

“Goudenow” sounds like a winner
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Wednesday, June 15, 2005

An exotic and irrational entertainment, Johann Mattheson’s “Boris Goudenow”…offers more than three hours of delightful music…Mattheson’s opera had to wait 295 years for its first staged performances enterprisingly presented this week by the Boston Early Music Festival. The composer was a considerable musician best remembered today for having dueled with Handel…his melodies have an irresistibly sensuous Italianate curve to them and they linger in the memory. One number, the death aria of the old Czar, does arrive at pathos, at least when the violin obbligato is delivered as meaningfully as concertmaster Robert Meal did last night…

BEMF mounted an entertaining show, with lavish-looking period sets and costumes by David Cockayne and Anna Watkins, respectively; a silhouette of the Moscow skyline won a special hand. Lucy Graham supplied pertinent and entertaining choreography and collaborated with Nils Niemann on the fluid stage direction…The crows roared its loudest approval when co-musical directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs appeared onstage at the end. Either one of them could have seized the scepter and been proclaimed Czar.

Camerata marks birthday in style
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Monday, June 20, 2005

To celebrate the Boston Camerata’s 50th birthday, the City Council officially proclaimed Saturday “Boston Camerata Day.” The city has abundant reason to be proud of this renowned ensemble; the group’s way of celebrating was to perform its “Carmina Burana” program for an enthusiastic Jordan Hall audience at the Boston Early Music Festival.

Camerata artistic director Joel Cohen put together this program 10 years ago, recorded it, and toured it widely. It was good to hear it again…There was some very good singing by a current Camerata team, with veterans making strong showings: sonorous baritone Donald Wilkinson; soprano Anne Azema, singing with vivid imagination and delicacy of detail; tenor Timothy Leigh Evans, plaintively voicing the lament of a roasted swan. Among the relative newcomers mezzo Deborah Renz-Moore [sic] and baritone Aaron Engebreth promised a bright future, along with a lively group from the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. Cohen led a vigorous instrumental group from his lute, and provided intelligent and amusing spoken commentary….

[At Friday’s BEMF Orchestra concert] Russian violinists Andrey Reshetin and Maria Krestinskaya offered a lively, scruffy performance of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. With eloquence and finesse, cellist Phoebe Carrai played a terrific concerto by Johann Wilhelm Hertel (1727-1789) that deserves a place in the repertory alongside the concertos of Haydn…A fortepiano concerto in F-Minor by Hertel is an equally strong piece, which manages to sound simultaneously baroque, classical, and romantic. The virtuoso fingers, highly developed ear, and prodigious musical personality of fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout served it handsomely….

Recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute offered contrasting concerti by Telemann and Vivaldi, playing both of them with crackling vitality and whizzing velocity. The program closed with a splendid “Magnificat” for double chorus by the composer of this year’s festival opera “Boris Goudenow,” Johann Mattheson. Most of the excellent young singers served in the chorus for “Boris.” Bass Olivier Laquerre, the old Czar Theodorus, contributed an imposing solo to the “Magnificat.” The score was composed with an impressive virtuosity matched by that of the players and singers.

“Boris Goudenow” Review
Wayman Chin, Opera News
September 2005

It isn’t every day that one attends the world premiere of an opera nearly 300 years old. But thanks to the efforts of the Boston Early Music Festival, Johann Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow, composed in 1710, finally reached the stage on June 14.

For reasons that remain purely speculative, Mattheson’s Boris was never produced. As for recent history, all of Mattheson’s scores were thought to have perished in the Allied bombing of Hamburg during World War II; in fact, the Mattheson catalogue had been removed from the Hamburg Library for safekeeping earlier on, eventually ending up after the war behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Armenia. In 1998, in return for German financial aid to Armenia, the Hamburg materials were returned to Germany.
In Mattheson’s treatment, Boris Goudenow’s ascension to the Russian throne is essentially a framing device for subplots and love triangles as convoluted as anything you’d see on Desperate Housewives. It was no mean feat navigating the plot’s twists and turns…Mattheson’s score is filled with shapely melodies…[and] there were some fine moments…two beautiful duets for the lovers Axinia and Gavust were sung with limpid radiance by Catherine Webster and Colin Balzer, and in the swan song of the dying Tsar Theodorus, Olivier Laquerre displayed an impressive spirit of resignation and resolve. As for William Hite’s turn as the buffoon Bogda, let’s just say that comic relief has never felt so good. Harkening back to the slapstick genius of Ed Wynn, Milton Berle and Red Skelton, Hite simply stole the show.

A tsar is born
Jeffrey Gantz, The Boston Phoenix
Friday, June 24, 2005

It might not be a rediscovery on the order of finding Aeschylus’s lost Oedipus trilogy or Shakespeare’s missing Love’s Labour’s Won, but the Boston Early Music Festival’s retrieval and reconstruction of Hamburg composer Johann Mattheson’s never-performed 1710 opera Boris Goudenow is a living, breathing example of a form that too often over the ensuing 295 years has been DOA at the opera house, overstuffed in sets and costumes and avoirdupois, inert in performance, and overpriced at the box office. Boris does everything an opera should; it sings (vocalists and orchestra members), it acts, it dances. It’s not a popular entertainment on the order of U2 or Star Wars, but it’s hugely entertaining. No surprise that after the four concerts here in town last week it’s going on to Tanglewood this weekend…One wonders whether London, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, and Milan won’t also be calling….

More As You Like It than Macbeth, Mattheson’s macaronic Boris (some arias in German, some in Italian) is no lightweight....Yet the BEMF production should ensure that he lives in Mattheson’s opera as much as in Mussorgsky’s. Taking as their model a theater pit in the Czech Republic, O’Dette and Stubbs arranged the 32-piece orchestra around what looks like a long narrow table with tiny reading lamps, giving the [Emerson Majestic Theatre] audience the impression it had been invited to a dinner party with a lavish entertainment. Everywhere there’s the ebb and flow of human life: the BEMF Orchestra, led by a bobbing and weaving but never obtrusive Robert Mealy, making Baroque music for the 21st century; David Cockayne’s set design alternating public (the tsar’s throne room; Boris’s cloister retreat; the Kremlin at sunset) and private (intimate scenes in front of the orange proscenium curtain); Lenore Doxsee’s lighting signaling emotional shifts (warming outside the icy monastery as Irina warms to Fedro); Lucy Graham’s choreography giving voice to what words can’t express.

Russian bass Vadim Kravets is an anchoring Boris, his voice oak-like in its authority, his almost baby face deceptive in its determination while leaving you to wonder whether the new tsar is ready for life beyond opera. Tenor Aaron Sheehan and soprano Nell Snaidas were well-matched as Ivan and Olga: he’s tall and rangy and moves like the Prince Ivan of Russian folklore and she’s his Firebird, feathery and flirtatious and never still. Their voices match too, both forgoing power for inflection….

Canadian bass-baritone Olivier Laquerre’s magisterial Theodorus is a weary Old Testament patriarch commending his life to the God who created him; tenor Julian Podger’s arch Josennah recalls Colin Firth’s Lord Wessex in Shakespeare in Love but transcends cardboard villainhood in his tender arias to the crown and then to Axinia. As the opera’s counter-anchor, local tenor William Hite’s Bogda sniffs his armpits, wrinkles his nose, and farts whenever he can’t help it, which is often. The precursor to Mozart’s suffering-but-smart servants, and Goldoni’s, he whips a monk’s robe out of his duffel bag at the mere mention of easy life in the monastery, though once there he can’t keep the children from turning him into a human Maypole and crowning him king of the chamberpots….

Opera began as the happy marriage of singing, dancing, and acting; then it got two left feet, and when it stopped dancing, it stopped acting as well. the half-dozen dancers headed by balletmistress Melinda Sullivan contribute a duet for guards with halberds, a sly passepied in which the attendants of Gavust, Axinia, and Josennah spoof their masters, a grave sarabande in memory of Theordorus, and a hymeneal chaconne “for Cupids and Pleasures” plus the riotous Act II monastery suite for children and codgers. More than that, though, they keep this Boris on its toes; it’s as if the dancing were infectious. When everybody moves, the result is moving.

Soprano is a breath of fresh air
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Sunday, June 17, 2005

Karina Gauvin strode onstage at the Boston Early Music Festival Wednesday night, flaunting a silk cerise stole, eyes flashing, blond hair flying, diva cleavage heaving. And then the Canadian soprano proceeded to sing up a storm in arias from Johann Georg Conradi’s opera “Ariadne” to open a program celebrating BEMF operas past…She clicked off chains of coloratura with dazzling accuracy, declaimed recitative with conviction, suspended long melodic lines on an endless stream of breath, and basically sang her heart out….

Ellen Hargis offered Orfeo’s lament from Luigi Rossi’s “L’Orfeo,” another BEMF opera, with touching simplicity…Bass Marek Rzepka sang a Mattheson aria with charm, and Jane Tankersley stepped in the replace an ailing Catherine Webster in Handel’s rewrite of the same piece. She sang with admirable brightness, as did high soprano Brenna Wells, who stepped in for Webster in a Mattheson serenade….

The program opened with an orchestral showpiece, a suite from still another BEMF opera, Lully’s “Thésée,” played with ardent, stylish expertise by the BEMF orchestra, which continues to redefine the art of baroque playing. The fabulous continuo section includes festival codirectors Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette on lutes, harpist Maxine Eilander, harpsichordist Joerg Jacobi, cellist Phoebe Carrai, and gambist Erin Headley.

The 11 p.m. BEMF concert, in St. Cecilia’s Parish, showcased Boston’s own Blue Heron Renaissance choir, under the direction of Scott Metcalfe. The program featured music from the 15th and 16th centuries by Josquin, Pierre de la Rue, and Heinrich Issac [sic], sung with tonal purity, accurate intonation, and careful balance…For some people, Renaissance choral music has become a sound to bliss out to. When Metcalfe and his exceptional group are performing it, this becomes music to listen to intently—and blissfully.

With a bloody tale and a harp, he captivates the crowd
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Saturday, June 18, 2005

For a chilling quarter-hour, Benjamin Bagby held a Boston Early Music Festival audience in the palm of his hand Thursday night. The cofounder and director of the medieval-music ensemble Sequentia performed an episode from an Icelandic Rhinegold epic; Wagner drew on similar material for his “Ring” cycle of operas. Bagby had the assistance of a drum and flute flourish to introduce the episode, and Agnethe Christensen contributed a few lines from the story’s female character.

Bagby, accompanying himself on a six-string harp, was the bard: the narrator and all of the male characters. Moving fluently between heightened speech and declamatory song, he told the bloody tale of murder and dreadful revenge with incomparable vividness. You could see the story taking possession of his body as he portrayed a death blow or a beating heart, expressed courage or contempt, his eyes wild with excitement as he described the villain feasting on his own children. He was a one-man opera, with no need for scenery, wig, makeup, costumes, or lighting—although he did have surtitles for the old Icelandic language. Deservedly, he got a standing ovation in mid-concert….

[Eric] Mentzel, tenor and countertenor, and Chrsitensen, a mezzo with a pop singer’s low voice, managed to combine highly cultivated musicianship and tone with singing of raw, folklike character.
The second half featured the more vivid storytelling songs, as well as some naughty seduction material that showed the medieval mind was preoccupied with some of the same subjects as the modern.
This delightful event was followed at 11 p.m. with a recital by baroque violinists Andrey Reshetin and Maria Krestinskaya, who had already played three hours in the BEMF opera “Boris Goudenow.” They offered 18th-century Russian salon music, including elegant duos by Ivan Jarnovik and Ivan Khandoshkin. Boston harpsichordist Peter Sykes shone in a hunting-horn sonata by Paisiello and joined Reshetin in works with keyboard accompaniment.

Even playing baroque violins in historically informed style, Reshetin and Krestinskaya were recognizably Russian violinists in their conception of tone and virtuoso approach to their instrument. And in Khandoshkin’s endless variations on a Russian song, it was fun to hear Reshetin play baroque violin with smoldering gypsy expression.

An Early Music finale
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Friday, June 24, 2005

The Boston Early Music Festival is not yet officially over, because there are performances of Johann Mattheson’s opera “Boris Goudenow” at Tanglewood tonight and tomorrow. But the Boston part of the festival closed Sunday afternoon with the welcome return of The King’s Noyse, a violin band that had been a great favorite in festivals past, but had not been heard from locally since 2000 (when founder David Douglass moved away from Boston, the group went with him).

The ensemble plays a matched consort of four instruments—violin, viola, and the rare tenor and bass violin—and specializes in a repertoire that bridges the high culture and the pop culture of the Renaissance. Sunday’s delightful program of German music featured philosophical songs, drinking songs, love songs, and lewd songs, played with joyous verve and sung with distinction and wit by tenor William Hite and Sumner Thompson, whose high baritone is startlingly beautiful.

Two other late-night concerts are worthy of note. A two-lute concert by the festival’s co-artistic directors, Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette, has become a tradition; Friday night’s concentrated on German lute music of elegant character, played with finesse and expertise. Of special interest was a sonata for two lutes by Sylvius Leopold Weiss. Only one of the two parts survives, so Stubbs ingeniously composed a replacement.

A “Dueling Cantatas” program on Saturday night pitted Mattheson against Handel…In Handel’s dramatic “La Lucrezia,” diva Karina Gauvin brought down the house, as she had earlier in the week…In the Mattheson cantata “Suspirato mio bene,” bass Marek Rzepka displayed personal and vocal charisma.