To the Glory of God in Music and Vision 14 Settembre

To the Glory of God
GIUSEPPE PENNISI vists
the Sagra Musicale Umbra,
celebrating old and new continents

As I mentioned in my review here last year, the Sagra (literally 'A Local Feast') Musicale Umbra is the oldest music festival in Italy. It has special features when compared with any other European festival: it is a nine day journey (10-18 September 2011) through an entire region where it combines the beauty of landscape, monuments and art with few parallels anywhere. Of the main towns in the region, only Spoleto does not participate in the Sagra -- almost to recall that around the year 900 it was an independent Duchy -- and this year it juxtaposes to the event a nearly pathetic opera season (just Butterfly and a few intermezzi) entrusted to young singers and to a makeshift orchestra. Another feature is the very strong local participation in the Sagra: financed almost entirely locally (and privately), private estates are open to the general audience for the concerts and, sometimes, the owners offer bountiful buffet dinners when the musical part is finished. The integration between music, on the one hand, and various forms of visual art, on the other, has always been an essential element of the Sagra.
Traditionally, The Sagra Musicale Umbra is a festival of 'spiritual' music. This does not mean that it is a festival of religious or sacred or Roman Catholic music. The intention is to offer, in St Francis' region, music dealing with themes that talk to the soul. The 2010 edition was named 'Pilgrimages of the Soul' because the nine days of concerts were in nine different localities. The 2011 edition is named 'From the old world to the new'. It is a tribute to Francesco Siciliani (for fifty years the musical director and the real driver of the Sagra). Siciliani was one of the first to bring Leonard Bernstein to Italy and to develop a lifelong friendship with him. For this reason, the 2011 program focuses on Bernstein as a composer and on the musical relationship between Europe and the New World (both the United States and Latin America). This is an uncharted journey which explores the first centuries of European musical grafting between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century that took place in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and eventually North America. In short, Bernstein, Ives and other US composers are present alongside De Salazar, De Araujo, De Capillas, Zipoli and other less known composers from Central and South America. It is also a rather unique opportunity to listen to the Peruvian Trujillo Code (a book of traditional songs and dances of the seventeenth and eighteenth century) and to ancient Aztec, Nahauti and Jarocho music (often prayers to their polytheistic Gods). Thus, the Sagra goes to the earliest examples of sacred music in the newly evangelized areas of Central America, the polyphonic music of Juan Gutierrez de Padilla (a Spanish composer who was very active in Mexico). Also during the course of the Sagra, Jordi Savall reveals to us the links with popular music between the two continents. Given the festival's theme, the program could not include Dvorák's New World Symphony interpreted by Daniel Harding and the Philharmonic Orchestra of La Scala; it is also juxtaposed to Wagner's Parsifal -- Prelude and Good Friday. I was in Umbria on 10 and 11 September and attended the initial symposium and the first group of concerts.
The festival's journey moves, to a large extent, backwards. However, the first concert is a confrontation between English and French music in the late sixteenth century and the British and American Music in the nineteenth century and the second concert deals with Shakespeare's Sonnets as put to music by the Italian-American composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. The travel backwards starts from the third concert: a confrontation between Bernstein and Fauré.

From left to right: Professor Giovanni Guanti, Marcello Filotei, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, Salvatore Sciarrino and Giovanni Carli Ballola at the Symposium on Music and Faith. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo
On the first day of the Sagra, 10 September, a major international symposium was held on Music and Faith; it was chaired by His Eminence Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi (Chairman of the Pontifical Council of Culture) and attended by musicologists, philosophers and political scientists from Italy and abroad. The gist of the conference can be summarized in the conclusions of Edward Higginbottom's paper: 'We worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness by taking care that the tempo is right and the ensemble is decent. Nature is God's Art; Art is God's Nature. And Music is Worship and Worship is Music'. It is useful to recall that on 16 April 2007, at the end of the concert offered for his eightieth birthday, Pope Benedict XVI, himself a musician, said: 'Music is the universal language of beauty, capable to unite good-willed men and women and take them towards the Heights of the Almighty'.

The Mass in St Lawrence's Cathedral, Perugia. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
The symposium was followed by a High Mass in St Lawrence's Cathedral, Perugia. Even though not included in the musical part of the Sagra, the High Mass was to a large extent a concert because the musical accompaniment was entrusted to the choral ensemble Armoniosoincanto, a women's chorus directed by Franco Radicchia and with the virtuoso Adriano Falcioni at the organ. The ensemble has already produced a number of CDs with specialized but commercial recording companies. However, the music was essentially Gregorian from a variety of Missa; hence, outside the theme of the Sagra. The congregation could appreciate the vocal purity of Armoniosoincanto with a sound where each and every word of the prayers could be fully understood and amplified by the melodies.

The Choir of New College Oxford at St Nicholas Abbey in San Gemini. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
The first and the third concerts had as their protagonist a well-known British group: Oxford's New College Choir, created way back in 1379. The chorus director is Edward Higginbottom (also a quite well-reputed conductor and a specialist of French music) and Lawrence Thain was at the organ. The 10 September concert was at St Nicholas Abbey in San Gemini, nearly one hour's drive South of Perugia -- an eleventh century Roman abbey recently refurbished with love and tender care by a business family which lives in what used to be the nearby convent.

Edward Higginbottom at St Nicholas Abbey in San Gemini. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
The abbey was packed, and so was the courtyard for the generous after-concert dinner. The program had two parts: 'Masters across the English Channel', ie British and French music of the seventeenth century, and 'Masters across the Ocean', referring to English and American music of the twentieth century. The first part centered on Purcell, Locke and Couperin. The second part travelled from Britten, Dove and Tippett to Lauridsen, Ives, Stravinsky (in his American period) and included the first Italian performance of Bernstein's short but very effective 1988 Missa Brevis, one of the last scores he composed.

The Choir of New College Oxford at St Nicholas Abbey in San Gemini. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
On 11 September in the large St Peter's Basilica, the Oxford New College Chorus was accompanied by the Tetraktis percussion group, Alessandro Bianconi at the organ, Alberto Casadei on the cello and the Camerata Strumentale Città di Prato, one of the finest chamber music orchestras of Central Italy. Benjamin Williamson was the countertenor, Alexander Learmonth the baritone and Jonty Ward the treble voice. The program included, in the first part, Bernstein's Three Meditations from the Mass for cello and orchestra and the Chichester Psalms, then, in the second part, Faure's Requiem. Edward Higginbottom conducted.

Members of Camerata Strumentale Città di Prato with Edward Higginbottom in San Pietro, Perugia. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
In short, two challenging and rewarding concerts for the British boys and their director. Both on 10 and 11 September, they received standing ovations by an audience who could fully sense a tradition of stern discipline and virtuous vocalizing. On 10 September, the night was very hot in the crowded small Abbey, and the chorus in their red gowns did not miss a note or even a semi-tone of either the rich seventeenth century score (often composed to impress the audience) or of the complex nineteenth century music. Also, their handling of the Missa Brevis was quite moving.

Camerata Strumentale Città di Prato and New College Choir in San Pietro, Perugia. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
On 11 September, the program, especially Fauré's Requiem, was dedicated to those who lost their lives on 11 September 2001 in New York's Twin Towers. The audience observed a minute of silence before the start of the music in the gorgeous and not so hot Basilica. The British and the Italian groups, including the soloists, mixed quite well and responded effectively to Higginbottom's baton. The first section of the concert -- Bernstein's Meditations -- had been especially conceived for Mstistlav Rostropovich as a short but major appeal to peace and brotherhood among men and women of different Faiths but under a single God. The young cellist Alberto Casadei (twenty-four years old) offered a masterly virtuoso performance, followed by an encore.

Edward Higginbottom. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
The musical world of the Chichester Psalms was very different, of course. Albeit commissioned by an Anglican Church, the words are in Ancient Hebrew as perceived by the American grandson of a Russian rabbi. The orchestra interacts with the chorus (and with a countertenor, one of the choir members). Thus the New College Choir had to switch from English to Hebrew and eventually to Latin (for the Fauré). The voices of the choir and of the countertenor merged quite well with the orchestra.

Members of The Choir of New College Oxford at St Nicholas Abbey in San Gemini. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
After the intermission, Fauré's Requiem was offered in its original 1893 version with a comparatively small orchestra (mostly violas and cellos) without all the ornamental additions made later (mostly by Fauré's students). The end-result is a stronger role for the choir and soloist but mainly a clearer direction from the B minor darkness of the Introduction and Kyrie to the light of B major of the final celestial In paradisum sung by a young child. Ovations and accolades to all at the end of the concert.
In the afternoon of 11 September, in the St Francis' Museum of Montefalco -- a forty-five minute drive South-East of Perugia -- the soprano Valentina Coladonato, the baritone Filippo Bettoschi and the pianist Claudio Proietti offered a rather special gift: a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets as set to music by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968), an Italian born but naturalized American composer who had to escape from his country in the 1930s because he was a Jew, even though he had started a successful career as the author of operatic and guitar works and was the scion of a wealthy banking family who reportedly had even helped Fascism financially, seen as a way to restore peace in Italy after World War I; this did not assist him with the Nazis.

From left to right: Quirino Principe, Claudio Proietti, Valentina Coladonato and Filippo Bettoschi. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
In the USA he composed the scores for over two hundred Hollywood movies as well as chamber music and operas based on The Merchant of Venice and The Importance of Being Earnest which had good reviews in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the world's first performance of his Shakespeare Sonnets because Italy and the USA have practically forgotten him. This was a very elegant rendition of Shakespeare's work.

Valentina Coladonato. Photo © 2011 Adriano Scognamillo. Click on the image for higher resolution
Valentina Caladonato is a very professional lyric soprano. The diction and phrasing of the baritone Filippo Bettoschi was quite impressive. Before each sonnet, the Italian musicologist and actor Quirino Principe read his own translation from English into Italian. Warm applause by a not very large crowd, but the concert was certainly conceived for a very sophisticated audience.
Copyright © 14 September 2011 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

EDWARD HIGGINBOTTOM
CHOIR OF NEW COLLEGE OXFORD
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
GABRIEL FAURE
HENRY PURCELL
FRANCOIS COUPERIN
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
JONATHAN DOVE
MICHAEL TIPPETT
MORTEN LAURIDSEN
CHARLES IVES
SHAKESPEARE
ITALY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FRANCE
UNITED KINGDOM
LATIN AMERICA
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