The Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Stradella is probably best known for having been murdered by a hired assassin in Genoa in 1682 because of his involvement with a married woman. This Spitalfields Music Winter festival programme by the English Concert under its artistic director Harry Bicket, however, offered a rare opportunity to hear one of Stradella’s actual works on a seasonally apposite Christmas theme.
His Cantata for Most Holy Christmas begins, somewhat oddly, with a substantial section presided over by Lucifer – here malevolently personified by bass-baritone Giles Underwood – who, aided and abetted by a chorus of Furies, fulminates at the birth of Jesus and its spiritual implications.
Stradella’s melodically immediate score is characterised by a sensuousness of manner that typifies the Italian style of his period. With soprano Cecilia Osmond an expressive Virgin Mary, countertenor Owen Willetts a business-like St Joseph, soprano Rebecca Outram doubling as the ethereal Angel and the reverent First Shepherd, and tenor Nicholas Mulroy as the latter’s visionary second-in-command, it brought the evening to a delightful close.
The first half was devoted to French as opposed to Italian music, including another celebratory Christmas piece in the shape of the motet In Nativitatem Domini Nostri Jesu Christi by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Taking on the work’s two main solo parts with a little help from the other singers, Underwood fleshed out the Biblical narrative while Osmond lightly sketched in the Angel who brings the good news to the shepherds.
Under Bicket’s skilled direction, the players of the English Concert made delectable sounds in bringing this intricate score – full of ingenuity and charm – back to life.
Earlier, Willetts, Mulroy and Underwood had joined together to deliver the solo parts in one of Charpentier’s settings of the Magnificat, preceded by another rarity in the shape of an attractive trio sonata by the neglected figure of Jean-François Dandrieu.
• Spitalfields Music Winter festival continues until 15 December. Box-office: 020-7377 1362. Available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.
