In 1613, Claudio Monteverdi, indisputably one of the major figures in Western music history, took over the most important musical position in Europe: maestro di cappella at the Basilica of St. Mark's in Venice. In the summer of 1989, just a little over 375 years later, a choir that has been acclaimed one of the finest in the world--England's Monteverdi Choir--celebrated its own silver jubilee with a world tour and a special concert recorded live in the same basilica, to be released during the Christmas season, featuring Monteverdi's dramatic Vespers of 1610.
St. Mark's has been attracting talent from all over Europe for hundreds of years, going back to the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, who took the choral writing of the Netherlands south with him when he was brought to Venice in 1527. There he evolved the stately, polychoral music so ideally suited to the elaborate ceremonies and resonant acoustics of St. Mark's. This Venetian choral style spread all over Europe and was only supplemented in the early 1600s by another Venetian innovation: opera. Though the earliest experiment with operatic writing came from Florence, Monteverdi and Venice created opera as we know it today--a dramatic spectacle celebrating the singer and enthroning the voice. The three Monteverdi operas that survive from the dozen or so he probably wrote--Orfeo (1607), The Return of Ulysses, (1641) and The Coronation of Poppea (1642)--win greater audiences every year. Venice also saw the perfection of the concerto grosso form is in the works of Antonio Vivaldi, the son of a violinist employed by St. Mark's.
Flamboyant City
All these forms have their links with the great basilica that rises serenely above the canals, an eleventh-century combination of Byzantine domes, resplendent mosaics, and an immense, echoing interior bathed in golden-green light. Venice, one of the greatest trading cities of its day, was free of much of the church influence that dominated musical life in Rome. It was a hedonistic, extroverted melting pot of influences Eastern and Western, a flamboyant city that witnessed the birth and flowering of the Baroque era.
The Monteverdi Choir has made some conquests of its own, notably in the field of Baroque music. Together with the instrumental group the English Baroque Soloists, for whom John Eliot Gardiner is also music director, the choir is the premier early-music ensemble of London, a city that saw the beginnings, and is now seeing the blossoming, of interest in music of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.
Gardiner founded the choir in 1964, while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. His goal then was a modest one; a performance of the same Vespers of 1610 that was featured in this May's concert in Venice. The 1964 performance was put together with the encouragement of Gardiner's teacher, the late Thurston Dart, and it proved a milestone in the rediscovery of early music. It was a break with tradition, a break that Gardiner still perpetuates in his lively, compelling performances with the choir.
Gardiner worked with a small group of about thirty. In the mid-1960s, the instruments he used were not copies of authentic seventeenth-century models, as they are now. But the vocal style Gardiner engendered--Mediterranean, operatic, and distinctly Venetian--separated the Monteverdi Choir from the restrained and reserved
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