Full-bodied passion of the Virgin Mary restrained
Claudio Monteverdi's wildly popular 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin is a choral and orchestral paean of love to the Virgin Mary. Last week, the Royal Albert Hall filled with 8,000 people for Robert King's and the King's Consort's non-stop 105-minute performance - rapt and attentive, the audience listened, waiting for the musically induced spiritual rush that would lift them on to another plane.
In Latin, vesper means evening, and the vespers is the Catholic evening prayer service. As in the original church service, Monteverdi's Vespers is a mix of psalms, hymns, canticles and chanted lessons. But Monteverdi, the father of modern opera, takes this traditional service and makes it grand and intensely dramatic. Dances and concerti are mixed with traditional sections, and celebratory cornets and sackbuts (medieval wind instruments) are added as choirs burst into song from elevated galleries, and scattered soloists sing out in startling stereo.
The Vespers mix of prayers, psalms and biblical texts includes Monteverdi's unforgettable setting of Nigra Sum, from the Song of Songs: 'I am a black but beautiful daughter of Jerusalem so the King loved me and led me into his bedroom.' Solomon supposedly wrote these words about a village girl he was infatuated with and later made one of his wives. Monteverdi uses this text to exalt the Virgin Mary in a full-bodied, Italianate way and James Gilchrist's singing caught the ambiguous passion that lies between flesh and spirit.
Also from Song of Songs, the Pulchra es was sensuously entwined by sopranos Rebecca Outram and Carolyn Sampson: 'You are beautiful my love, a sweet and comely daughter of Jerusalem.'
The spiritual rush never quite came, however, and although the applause was long, it was not ecstatic. For all King's technical excellence, the passion had never really been let out of the bottle, no link made with Monteverdi's expressive secular operas and madrigals.
Monteverdi wrote the Vespers to showcase his talents. He was 43 in 1610, fast running out of money and under attack in a polemic from a leading musical theorist, Giovanni Artusi, for 'contrapuntal unorthodoxies'. Artusi championed theoretical correctness over expressivity and Monteverdi was clearly getting far too emotional for him.
It was time to move on, and Monteverdi started casting around for a new post. He had his eye on the position of master of music at St Mark's Cathedral in Venice and he wrote the Vespers as part of a successful campaign to get appointed there. That's why Duo Seraphim is in the Vespers - with no link to the Virgin Mary, Monteverdi probably included it because it was a motet of which he was particularly proud.
Now 44, King has been widely acclaimed as a leading British conductor of his generation. His Proms conducting debut was in 1991 and ever since he has been wowing audiences with brilliantly vibrant performances of Vivaldi, Bach, Handel and Purcell. Strangely, his Vespers echoed an old controversy - too much theoretical correctness and not enough expressivity.
