The Monteverdi Choir’s Wigmore concert, with its founder-conductor John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, was an evening of two very disparate stylistic halves linked by themes of love and dancing. Monteverdi’s pastoral Tirsi e Clori, graciously informing us that “all that is best we learn from the dance”, rounded off a long opening group of the composer’s madrigals. After the interval, choruses and part-songs by Schubert and Brahms were brought to a close by the latter’s Op 52 set of Liebeslieder Walzer, with its amatory games and rituals whirling away in three-four time.
The Monteverdi Choir has dominated the choral scene worldwide for more than 50 years now, and their singing remains wonderfully committed and scrupulously focused. Just occasionally, however, the scale felt too big. Gardiner used a choir of 19, with the soloists drawn from among its members. Liebeslieder Walzer sounded gorgeous, though the piece itself works better in its original version for four solo singers: with a bigger body of voices at full throttle, the counterpoint can blur, and Brahms’s playfulness assumes a curiously aggressive edge.
Much of it was beautiful. Monteverdi’s Hor che’l Ciel e la Terra e’l Vento Tace brought with it a sense of rapt introspection and some immaculate high, soft tenor singing as its initially serene landscape gradually became strewn with dissonant emotions. Schubert’s Gondelfahrer, for male voices and piano, was all elegance and wit, its tricky counterpoint superbly negotiated.
Gardiner absented himself from the platform for Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, leaving his vivid narrator, tenor Krystian Adam, to dominate the work, while Peter Davoren and Francesca Aspromonte played the duelling lovers. Aspromonte, also a guitarist, accompanied herself and Adam in the opening duet of Tirsi e Clori as they bantered together suggestively.
