Monteverdi Tragicomedia

Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers are rightly considered to be one of the greatest monuments of Baroque church music. Stephen Stubbs, with the ensembles Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino, along with a group of top-notch singers, began to perform the Vespers on a yearly basis at the Pieterskerk in Leiden in 1998. The event developed into a musical capella, something like what Monteverdi must have had at St. Mark’s. The beautiful acoustics of the Pieterskerk, the inspirational "voice" of the great organ there, but most of all the warm atmosphere of a yearly “family” event that included both the musicians and the staff and visitors of the church have created what one might be tempted to call the "Leiden Vespers." This is the wonderful experience that has been captured on this exhilarating CD.

As we have come to expect with Tragicomedia, the programme is carefully considered, well balanced and colourfully presented. Unlike the group's last and somewhat disappointing release of Anna Magdalena Bach's Notebook (Teldec, 12/94), these Welcome Songs and Odes have a dramatic bite and emotional range (despite the poor-quality verse) which directors Stephen Stubbs and Erin Headley can nurture over comparatively longer periods; this is one of the reasons why they succeeded in their Monteverdi disc of Il Combattimento (10/93) where others are often found wanting. The music chosen here is all out of Purcell's top drawer, with Tragicomedia combining works with ravishing string ritornellos and extrovert paeans to the King, such as the gloriously crystalline and breezy Welcome, viceregent, with the more intimate elegies on the death of Queen Mary which have the capacity to melt marble.

Sublime musical expression does not necessarily proceed from serene spirits whose philosophical loftiness leaves them unmoved by the push and shove of the marketplace. Prefaces to printed editions of music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seldom reveal much of the personality behind the writer's effusive urge to prostrate himself before the dedicatee and his invocations to the muses to make worthy his humble efforts. Robert Jones, Tobias Hume and John Dowland were exceptions in this regard and often used their printed prefaces as a platform for polemics, self-defence and bile. In so doing they illumine the contemporary pressures of public opinion and changing fashions, as well as highly individual — not to say curmudgeonly — natures.