In the undulating and glowing landscape of the Crete Senesi, south of the Tuscan Siena, Philippe Herreweghe and his team have now been organizing a summer music festival for 19 years. His fans apparently want to see and hear him not only in his home country, but also near his country residence. And if you arrive on the opening evening at the small municipal square of Asciano, the festival's headquarters, you can indeed meet many fellow countrymen. But you also hear French, English, German, even Italian and of course Flemish. A lot of people then: 4968 tickets sold. Before the festival celebrates its 20th anniversary next year, I finally wanted to dive into that warm music bath. There are plenty of travel organizations that want to take you there. I chose Cimarosa and wrote the accompanying travel/review report below.
The concerts on the Sunday opening evening (28 July) formed a "Soirée Composée", as it said in the programme book. We started with a song recital in the Chiesa San Francesco of Asciano. A Russian programme with little known work: the vocalises of Prokofiev and – equally unknown – songs by Rachmaninov. The second concert, on the other hand, was with well-known work: suites and overtures by Telemann, convincingly performed by the young, internationally composed Ensemble Masques. Towards late evening, a third performance. A breathtaking Mala Punica sang and performed motets by Johannes Ciconia from around 1400. You can hardly call him a polyphonist yet, let alone a Flemish one. He was born in Liège, was active for a long time in Padua and is actually more a forerunner of polyphony. Or, in other words, a polyphonist of the 'zero generation'. Paul van Nevel already wrote a thorough monograph about him in 1981. Ciconia composed in a mix of the French and Italian styles of the time. What the ensemble of Mala Punica (soprano, mezzo and 2 tenors, supplemented with four players of old instruments) made of it was enough to leave you speechless. That was nuanced perfection by pure professionals, directed by an ever original and – literally – dancing Peter Memelsdorff. How that music must have sounded then, we don't know. Now it simply sounded sublime and subtle, true Ars subtilior.
French evening on Monday and again in the San Francesco church of Asciano, the epicenter of the Collegium Vocale Crete Senesi festival. With Debussy, Roussel and Dutilleux. At the back of the church poetry sounds on flute: the serene Syrinx. The core of Debussy's music captured in barely three minutes. Impressionistic, but he himself found it a term 'invented by an imbecile'. Yet his music goes through life like that. The only string quartet he wrote was the second work on the programme. These are orchestra members from the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Herreweghe is its honorary conductor. Four women, but not yet really forming a tight quartet. Followed a trio for flute and strings by Albert Roussel, a successful acquaintance with his work. And finally, Henri Dutilleux, a beautiful string quartet from 1976 that still sounded indebted to the radical innovator that Debussy was after all. And in between I couldn't help but look through the open church portal at the sun, colourfully setting over the Tuscan landscape. The experience couldn't have been more fitting with Dutilleux' Ainsi la nuit.
Warm and deeply dark
Once again a beautiful location for the midday concert on Tuesday, the quiet little church of Santo Stefano in Castelmuzio. Beethoven this time with the Edding quartet, two men, two women. Those already sounded like a real and tight quartet, well rehearsed with each other, even though they only started making music together in 2007. First violinist Baptiste Lopez gave a preliminary explanation of opus 127 by the master himself. He called it a very intimate work. And that was certainly to be heard in that very long Adagio. Warm it sounded and deeply dark, wrapped as it were by the gut strings on which they play, and turbulently ending in the final Allegro. Not immediately the most poignant of those last series of quartets that Beethoven wrote. It was the first. The series was a commission from a saving angel – a Russian aristocrat – who helped Beethoven financially and also morally out of need with it.
For the late evening concert once again a beautiful church, Sant' Anna di Camprena, in Pienza, and once again some 500 faithful followers of the Collegium Vocale gathered for their festival in the Crete Senesi. Heinrich Schütz is our share, and his opus 1, his madrigals. Secular songs, with plenty of text expression in the setting. When the poet writes about fleeting time, the composer makes you hear that time fleeing in notes and performance. When the singers sing about the wind, it blows in the notes and the voices. As it should be with Schütz and Herreweghe. Through and through the hallmark of his Collegium Vocale.
Top marks
At the Wednesday afternoon concert there was a soloist with a name like a bell: Pieter Wispelwey. When we arrived, once again in Castelmuzio, the cellist was huddled in a dark corner of the little church tuning his instrument. But once on the podium, seated on a high church chair and visible to everyone, he proved to be master of his instrument, his precious Guadagnini from 1760. He explained beforehand how vocal a cello could be, said that he would first play a prelude from the Bach cello suites as an introduction, then a cello suite by Britten and one by Ligeti and only then would he continue with Bach. Interesting program, but still a pity about that Bach-split. Of course everything was class, and he did it from time to time, as it were in blissful rapture, with eyes "raised to heaven". With Britten he played that difficult Presto quite virtuosically.
Another masterclass and a top work in the evening: Christoph Prégardien with Die schöne Müllerin. Twenty poems set to music in an unearthly beautiful way by Schubert. When and how do you recognize the quality of a singer? By volume or volume control? In the quiet or forte passages? Our tenor can do both, not yet past his prime, even though he is 63. Sometimes a bit too loud it seems to me, to be the fitting interpreter of that bashfully lovestruck young man. Travel guide and musicologist Pieter Bergé drew his fellow travellers' attention to something else, a somewhat excessive amount of added, small personal embellishments by Prégardien in the performance of Des Baches Wiegenlied. And yes, it's in the nuances. That's the advantage you have when you travel with an organization that hires a musicologist. One more thing: I was again struck by how much the piano accompaniment is situated in the lower and dark registers and here too how beautifully Schubert bids farewell to each song, and pianist Michael Gees adhered to it.
Not for the deaf ears
Program change for the piano recital on Thursday afternoon: Argentine star pianist Nelson Goerner replaces Liszt (including his Villa d'Este) with Chopin. That will please the audience too, of course. And after all it remains the same pianist. And how he does play. In the Nocturne (opus 48, 1-2) by Chopin he lets the final notes fade beautifully. And in the Scherzo he serves us you hear the notes like water drops fleeing clattering away just as in Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este by Liszt, albeit with a stormy finale. Then comes Blumenstück, a little work by young Schumann, always seemingly simple, and romantic. But with Beethoven's Appasionata comes the true romanticism. Even though the first notes of this well-known work sound simple, it breaks loose almost immediately into the true genius of Beethoven. Not for the deaf ears – sorry for the comparison – but how did he get that out of his deaf head. You have to be a genius. And although the second part begins quietly, the piece ends in virtuosic piano playing, also from performer Nelson Goerner. Thunderous applause of course. There was an encore, and then another, and what! For at least ten minutes he improvised (?) a potpourri on the waltzes of Johan Strauss. Perhaps a lesson for us, after all a rather elitist audience. To draw our attention to the fact that these popular tones too are worth sacrificing on the altar of classical music. That is how I understood the message.
Together with the performance of Mala Punica, that Goerner was one of the highlights of this generous Collegium Vocale festival. And generous you may well say, if for each concert you are moreover welcomed with a bite and a drink and if on the opening evening on the Piazza del Grano in Asciano (the municipality that co-organizes) you can all sit down at long tables for an extensive and tasty buffet – which despite the threatening storm could still take place thanks to the improvising talent of the organizing team. And then I won't even mention the other evening dinners, included in your subscription.
Accentuating, voicing, imagining
On the closing day six members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam formed a sextet to perform Wagner and Brahms. The Vorspiel zu Tristan und Isolde in an arrangement for string sextet. But to give me the usual goosebumps at that Tristan chord about impossible love, I did miss the sound volume and grandeur of the Concertgebouw Orchestra full house, and certainly at that swelling crescendo moment. But there was certainly quality, you expect nothing else from the members of such an orchestra and they took us with their playing to the bottomlessness of that infinite melody. Yet the sextet seemed more fitting to the sound idiom of Brahms. Beautiful role – once again – for the two cellists. Beautiful too to see how the members not only looked at their score or their instrument but also at each other. That is how it should be for musicians who are in dialogue with each other.
The closing concert on Friday 2 August naturally had to come from Collegium Vocale itself. Once again with Schütz, but now sacred music: a selection from his Psalmen Davids and composed almost ten years later than the madrigal collection we heard earlier in the week. But again here that way of writing, as he himself explains, "in the Italian manner". But now clearly embedded in the German Protestant choral tradition as well. The program also includes, between the psalms, two canzone by his Venetian teacher Giovanni Gabrieli. From him Schütz learned to write for multiple choirs. In the large San Marco basilica, Gabrieli could literally position those singers opposite each other. Here too in the small Sant'Anna Camprena church, the two groups of singers stood more or less opposite each other, but the intended stereo effect was probably not what you could ever have heard in the San Marco. With Schütz, melody and rhythm had to accentuate, voice, depict the meaning of the text. Text intelligibility was the guiding principle in his writing. He translated the text into musical terms. And let text expression now be the hallmark of Collegium Vocale and especially of their conductor. But whether people then (and now) could really understand those psalms remains a question. We, concert-goers, had a program booklet. Did church-goers in Schütz's time really know those long psalms by heart, the way Catholics once knew the "acts of faith, hope and charity"? But you are impressed, certainly now and perhaps also then. With the vocal power and finesse of the soloists, their perfect diction and supported by the instrumental ensemble, this was a closing concert more than worthy. On to the anniversary edition of 2020. With equally magnificent top musicians, top works and top team.
- WHAT: Telemann, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Roussel, Dutilleux, Beethoven, Schütz, Bach, Ligeti, Britten, Schubert, Mozart, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms.
- WHO: orchestral musicians from the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra and the Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam, Edding Quartet, Collegium Vocale Gent, Pieter Wispelwey, Christoph Prégardien, Michael Gees, Ensemble Masques, Nelson Goerner, Mala Punica, Eleanor Lyons, Stanislav Solovev
- WHERE: in the churches of Asciano, Castelmuzio and Pienza, all municipalities in the Crete Senesi region
- WHEN : Sunday 28 July through Friday 2 August 2019
- WEBSITE: https://www.collegiumvocalecretesenesi.com/