Last week I had a wonderful time attending the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF). Since 1980, BEMF has put on a weeklong festival every other year that is jam packed with concerts, workshops, exhibitions, lectures, and masterclasses, most of which focus on medieval, Renaissance, and/or Baroque music. BEMF attracts top-notch early-music performers, scholars, and instrument builders, as well as thousands of attendees from around the world.
I went to six concerts, two pre-opera lectures, and one lecture-recital. The music of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was the focus of this year’s Festival. All three of his extant operas—L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and L’incoronazione di Poppea—were staged. In addition, Monteverdi’s popular liturgical work, the Vespers of 1610, was performed.
Poppea and the Vespers were highlights of the week. The opera featured a superb cast, including rising Australian star David Hansen as Nerone, who sang with his impressively high and versatile countertenor voice. Canadian soprano Shannon Mercer sang a lovely Ottavia, easily making the audience empathize with the character through her heart-wrenching laments. A pleasantly unsuspected high point was Nell Snaidas, the Uruguayan-American soprano playing Amore and Valetto. Snaidas’s light, bright, and twangy voice perfectly conveyed the childish innocence as well as the sexual curiosity of these “tween” boy characters.
Video preview of the Monteverdi operas staged at the 2015 Boston Early Music Festival. Taken from https://youtu.be/wTt4snnVtic.
The Vespers performance, led by conductor Stephen Stubbs, was spectacular, particularly the sections featuring the highly ornamented singing of tenor soloists. The “Gloria” from the concluding Magnificat was especially chilling as Zachary Wilder sang an agitated, virtuosic line with an unnerving sense of tranquility while Jason McStoots added an otherworldly echo from off stage—a calm in the eye of the storm before the triumphant conclusion of the work in the “Sicut erat” for full chorus and orchestra.
Other high points of the Festival were a concert given by Catalan viola da gamba player Jordi Savall and his ensemble Hespèrion XXI and a concert led by lutenist Paul O’Dette featuring him and twenty two (!) other lute and early guitar players. I cannot do justice to all that I experienced in a full week at BEMF in a single blog post—if you’d like to read more about other concerts, I suggest you check out the reviews on the Boston Musical Intelligencer website (most of the reviews and stories about BEMF were posted between June 2 and 14, 2015).
Lutes galore at BEMF! Photo taken by Jacob Sagrans, June 11, 2015 at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Boston.
Attending BEMF was also especially meaningful for me as a musicologist who studies the early-music revival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was wonderful to get to go to many excellent concerts of music that I have grown to love over my years of study, and to do so at a festival that has played such an important role in the early-music revival (BEMF was one of the first festivals devoted to historically informed performance of early music and is one of the largest ones today).
It was inspiring to see how people at the festival reacted so positively to scholarship about early music. Scholarship is an integral part of the BEMF experience: in addition to detailed program notes about the historical and cultural contexts of the works featured in each concert, there were also lectures given by well-known musicologists, including seventeenth-century opera expert Ellen Rosand, Handel scholar Ellen Harris, and medievalist Thomas Forrest Kelly.
I attended two pre-opera lectures that Rosand gave, as well as a lecture-recital Kelly gave in collaboration with the Blue Heron vocal ensemble. I was impressed with both musicologists, as they enumerated the basics of complex repertoires in ways that were not only understandable but also exciting to all in the audience (not just other PhD musicologists).
What made Rosand and Kelly’s presentations especially great was that they focused on what made the music unique and why they personally loved it. Aspects of the music’s historical and cultural contexts were also discussed, but it was all for the purpose of helping the audience see how exciting the music we were about to hear was and to teach us to love the music just as Rosand and Kelly do. I would love to learn how to be just as engaging in my lectures.
Kelly’s lecture-recital with Blue Heron focused on what may have seemed, at first glance, to be a rather esoteric and dry topic: the development of Western musical notation in the Middle Ages (this topic is also the focus of Kelly’s most recent book, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation). Rather than just showing us what notation was like at various points in time, Kelly explained how developments in musical notation shaped the music that we had come to BEMF to hear, while Blue Heron, conducted by Scott Metcalfe, gave live demonstrations of the various pieces Kelly discussed. One particularly memorable part was when Kelly, wishing to give the audience a sense of what it would have been like for a thirteenth-century Parisian to hear a double-texted French motet, asked two of the performers to sing two songs from Sesame Street simultaneously! I hope Blue Heron puts a recording of that on its next album.
My copy of Dr. Kelly’s most recent book
Although it was not part of the Festival, I also made a point of going to the Boston Public Library to see an exhibit detailing the history of the Handel and Haydn Society. As the exhibit made apparent to me, the early-music revival has a very long and rich history in Boston dating back to the foundation of the Society in the early 1800s. It was fun to think that, by coming to Boston, I was participating in and helping support this long-seated tradition. I hope the early-music revival continues in Boston for at least another 200 years!
I am glad that I had the opportunity to go to the Boston Early Music Festival this year. I got a chance to take a break from working on my dissertation, relax, recharge, and experience a thrilling array of live performances and lectures that reminded me of why I love early music and why I am doing the research that I do. Lastly, it was lovely to spend much of my time in Boston with family, particularly my mother Jan, who came with me to all but one of the Festival events I attended—all while attempting to do her regular work (no easy feat—I hope she isn’t too worn out now). I also gather that she appreciated having me sitting next to her as her “personal musicologist” ready to answer (or attempt to answer) whatever questions she had about the music she was hearing. I look forward to going to many more concerts with her in the future.
Jacob Sagrans 