Sunday, December 1, 2024
7:00 PM
On WCRB In Concert with The Boston Camerata, Artistic Director Anne Azéma leads a celebration of the holiday season with music from the Renaissance and early Baroque eras, ranging from sacred songs to instrumental fantasias and choral masterpieces.
Giovanni GABRIELI Toccata del XI Tono
Amante FRANZONI Canzon La Gonzaga
GREGORIAN Hodie Christus natus est
GABRIELI Hodie Christus natus est
ANONYMOUS La Mantovana
Salamone ROSSI Sonata in dialogo
Luca MARENZIO Qual mormorio soave
GREGORIAN Ave Maria
Adrien WILLAERT Ave Maria gratia plena
Isabella LEONARDA Ave Regina Coelorum
ANONYMOUS La Mantovana (reprise)
Claudio MONTEVERDI Laudate Dominum
Giacomo GASTOLDI Magnificat
Cipriano da RORE Angelus ad pastores (Ancor che col partire)
Giovanni BASSANO Angelus ad pastores (instrumental)
Matteo COFERATI Ecco bella regina
MONTEVERDI Salve Regina
GABRIELI O Magnum Mysterium
Giorgio MAINERIO Tedesca (instrumental)
GREGORIAN Magi Videntes Stellam
COFERATI Parton d'all Oriente
Giaches de WERT Vox in Rama
COFERATI Lieti Pastori
Andrea GABRIELI Angelus ad Pastores
GREGORIAN Hodie Christus natus est (reprise)
COFERATI Dormi dormi Figlio dormi
MONTEVERDI Canticum Domino Canticum Novum
GASTOLDI A lieta vita
This performance was originally recorded on December 21, 2023 at First Church in Cambridge, MA, and is no longer available on demand.
See the program notes for this concert
Learn more about the Boston Camerata
For a preview of the program with Boston Camerata's Artistic Director, Anne Azéma, hear her interview with the audio player above, and read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT:
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at WCRB with Anne Azéma, the Artistic Director of Boston Camerata. Anne, thank you so much for a little of your time today. I appreciate it.
Anne Azéma Thanks, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
Brian McCreath I want to ask you about "Gloria! An Italian Christmas." It's a beautiful, beautiful program made up of music by some composers that maybe some people have heard of – Gabrieli among them – but some others that are much less well known, yet nevertheless very beautifully composed music. I guess that what I'm most curious about, to begin with, is what the challenges are of this particular kind of music, late Renaissance Italian music, that are unique, that are different from a lot of the other music that Camerata performs. What is it that the performers have to be ready for when they take on this program?
Anne Azéma You know, Brian, maybe it's like when you go to these Italian cities – or if you haven't gone, you can imagine it. You walk in these glorious piazzas and you see these big churches, beautiful architecture. But you may also take a right there [down] a little street and explore, and see the most beautiful courtyard or a little palazzo that you didn't expect to see. And if you haven't gone to Italy, I'm sure you have seen some of the photos of these buildings. But what interests me is how you go to the building and these little streets. So, in a way, to build a program on Italian late Renaissance and early Baroque music, it is a bit like that. You go to the names that you mentioned that everybody knows: Monteverdi and, you know, Gabrieli and all the others. You probably sang some pieces when you were at high school or in college or with friends and, you know, we know these names.
But what's interesting is all the names you don't know. And then the challenge is to actually, first of all, have the curiosity to find them, and then discover that, in fact, some of them require incredible virtuosity and some of them are very modest and are done, really, for you and me around our dining room table or outside in the streets during the Christmas time.
Brian McCreath One of the things that I notice in the course of the program is the interweaving of lines from one instrument to another instrument or between the choir, the singers, and the instrumentalists. And I just wonder how characteristic that is of this particular time and place as compared to maybe German music or English music from that same time. Is that a particularly Italian way of approaching music?
Anne Azéma Yes and no. I think that in Italy something starts to happen, which is one moves a little bit away from the voice, although the voice does some pretty interesting things already. But the instruments are beginning to fly by themselves, and they really invent incredible colors, and you'll hear some during the program. And so, it's inherent to the repertoire. But it's also, dare I say unmodestly, a choice of the Camerata to actually weave this all in and make everybody shine. This is maybe why we're 70 years old. We have somehow had the curiosity of, in a way, following not only the pieces we have in front of us, "What does this piece want from me?" but, "How can I make it shine the best? How can I share it under the best light with the teams, the beautiful teams that we have at the Camerata?" And I think it's a bit of both, to answer your question. There is something inherent to Italy which is very peculiar and will be copied by everybody in Germany, in France and so forth. And there is something also of our own making in a way to make that shine even more.
Brian McCreath One of the things that you mentioned before was that when you travel through Italy or when you even see pictures of these places in Italy, Venice and Florence, it helps you to maybe see where this music is coming from. Tell me about the relationship of the spaces in which this music was originally heard and what it means for the music itself.
Anne Azéma I think this is the most moving part for me about this music, and perhaps the one that the radio can't quite completely share with you. But your theater of the mind will somehow bridge this. You have these glorious double choir pieces where one part of the musical team answers the other, and they go back and forth like this, or you have one voice with one consort of instrument. And so that's incredible in the space it was conceived for because not only do you have the stones, the frescoes, the furniture, the light, but you also have the sound. And of course, in a concert hall or on the radio, we lose a little bit of that.
But I think there is also another part of the music-making here, certainly that I've tried to include in this program, which is the more intimate part, the home part. There is a spectacular madrigal to the Virgin Mary in the first half of the program, which is something probably sung in a small room. It doesn't need to be in a concert hall. It doesn't need to be in a huge Venetian church. And its intimacy is the point, that you have these voices speaking to each other in that intimate setting.
Brian McCreath Another aspect of this program is something that I think runs through a lot of if not every Boston Camerata program, which is that there's a narrative flow to it, that this is not a collection of pieces in which musicians traipse on stage, stand, perform, wait for applause, move on to the next piece as though it's a sort of ordered set of things to listen to. There's a flow from one piece to the next with narration drawn from the Christmas story. Tell me about that way of doing programing and how that is reflective of the mission of Boston Camerata.
Anne Azéma Well, since my youth, I've always been interested in theater and in narrative, and my first love is medieval narratives. So, there's that part of me which is very keen to continue this in my work in general. And the Camerata has done some spectacular work in staging some pieces, Medieval and others, and I'm the happiest when I can do that. But I also inherited the beautiful programing skills of the Boston Camerata. And if you listen to some of the very early LPs of the Camerata in the late '70s, you will hear that there is already there a narrative, and that it's not simply a test that this group of musicians is trying to pass by showing to you that they can do what they set up to do. But they're sharing it in a larger context. What continues to interest me is that context.
So, we have several chapters in our programs, and one is on the Virgin Mary, the visitation of Mary Elizabeth and a reflection on the mystery of the incarnation – you name it, whatever you want. But there are several moments with several parts of the history and yes, we include the reading of the Christmas story because it's a very powerful narrative. A little baby comes in and somehow God has been incarnated in that little baby, which is rejected by everybody. Wow. That's a powerful narrative. It's hard not to include.
Brian McCreath And it's not just an amazing story, but regardless of any particular listener's faith or belief system, those readings illuminate what the composers meant to do with this music.
Anne Azéma Absolutely. And we tend to forget when we go to a concert that a lot of this was never meant to be in a concert. It was meant to be either part of a liturgy, Christian, Catholic liturgy, or for a devotional moment privately at home or in a small court of people, or outside for you and me and the carpenter and whoever wants to actually walk together singing, this spiritually inclined group of the Virgin Mary, say, for example. So, we tend to forget that the concert hall is not really the first arena that this music was conceived for. So therefore, it's very important to give, again, some context to all these pieces when we can.