Customer Reviews

Lamentazioni per la Settimana Santa

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... That's the title of my favorite book by the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata. I'd love to retranslate the title as "Beauty IS Sadness" or the converse "Sadness IS Beauty", a title which would fit this performance of settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah perfectly. Written for performance during the "tenebrae" (twilight) vespers services of Holy Week, such Lamentations were a genre by themselves of Catholic sacred music during the late Renaissance and Baroque epochs, a genre that includes some of the finest and most poignant music ever composed. Yes, this performance is uniformly sorrowful, intended, as the notes declare, to "revive the pleasures of sheer contrition to be had from singing such words as afflictio, dolor, and lamentatio..." Even if you, dear listener, aren't committed to contrition (yet), you'll seldom hear music of such soulful emotive beauty.

Tenebrae settings followed a strict pattern corresponding to the liturgical structure of vespers for the candlelight services for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week. Passages from the Book of Jeremiah, in Latin, were the "Lessons". There would have been other music, less dramatic, for the Psalms, with their antiphons, and other acts of worship during a Tenebrae service. Each lesson was introduced by a melismatic chant of the appropriate Hebrew-alphabet initial -- aleph, beth, etc. Likewise, each lessons conclude with the powerful poignancy of singing "Jerusalem convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum - Jerusalem, return to your Lord God." Such plaintive repetitions both help to unify the music and to sublimate the grief expressed in the text.

There must be 100 excellent recordings of 18th C music for every single recording of equal excellence of 17th C music. Survival of sources is one reason for that discrepancy, and another is stylistic familiarity, but sheer musical genius is NOT a reason. The composers on this CD --Carissimi, Michelangelo Rossi, Frescobaldi, Palestrina, Kapsberger, Marcorelli -- all merit performance and audience attention, and this CD is an excellent sampling of their musical brilliance. Many of the selections come from a single source, Manuscript Q43 of the Civiv Musum of Bologna, which includes 23 complete Tenebrae settings, many of them anonymous. All of the composers represented here were active in Rome, and specifically with the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. Thus there is a plausible unity in this reconstructed Tenebrae performance.

Soprano Maria Cristina Kiehr has a voice as lovely as candlelight on tapestry, the perfect voice for sustaining the sorrowful ecstasy of this music. One might worry about maintaining interest in a whole CD of mournful music sung by a single soprano with only continuo accompaniment, but in this case, the worry would be unjustified. Kiehr carries it off! The continuo is part of the beauty; it's artfully varied among the typical continuo instruments of the early 17th C: archlute, guitar, gamba, lirone, harp, and a reconstructed 'claviorganum' played by Jean-Marc Aymes, the director of Concerto Soave. The sung settings are spaced apart by instrumental fantasies, with each instrument having its special voice revealed from the shadows.

This is a CD that I've liked better each time I've listened to it. If you have enjoyed Palestrina or Monteverdi in the past, I'd expect you to find Concerto Soave a rare treasure.