Cantata Profana Captures the Death of a Saint
This is believed to be what happened to St. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, who died in Florence in 1607.
This is believed to be what happened to St. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, who died in Florence in 1607. Italian modernist composer Salvatore Sciarrino suggests what the extraordinary ritual must have been like in his hushed, twitchy and radically spare-textured “Infinito Nero: Estasi di un Atto” for soprano and eight instruments, composed in 1998.
The excellent and adventurous young musicians of Cantata Profana gave a rare and quietly riveting performance of Sciarrino’s strange piece Friday at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan. Since 2013, Cantata Profana has been presenting shows, as they call them, which are often semistaged and typically juxtapose very old and very new music. The players placed Sciarrino’s piece at the end of an 80-minute meditative show they titled “Visions of Silence.”
To set the mood, pianist Daniel Schlosberg played Alvin Lucier’s Music for Piano and Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1990), a piece in which intermittent, mostly soft, minimal piano sounds (single struck tones or intervals, wandering chords, fleeting squiggles of notes) are electronically refracted, prolonged or processed.
This led to a Tarquinio Merula canzonetta for soprano and lute. In this short 1636 duo, the Virgin Mary (soprano Alice Teyssier) holds the baby Jesus in her arms, trying to get the restless infant to sleep, though she is overcome with premonitions of the suffering that awaits him. The lute (played by the fine Arash Noori) is curiously fixated on two notes, though these recurring pitches are often decorated with filigree.
Next came Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya’s radically unconventional Symphony No. 5, “Amen” (1989), lasting just 15 minutes and scored for a curious ensemble: violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba, big wooden box and a speaker (Gleb Kanasevich), who says the Lord’s Prayer in Russian. The music is at once grave and grumpy, utterly serious and almost comic, swinging along in a foursquare meter like some slow march with a steady tread, each thematic note encrusted in a dour harmonic block. Then Noori returned to play Alessandro Piccinini’s “Toccata Cromatica” for solo lute (1623), a work in which lyrical strands spin out into soft-spoken swirling passagework.
Teyssier was the compelling soloist, singing Maria Maddalena, in the Sciarrino piece, which over 30 taut minutes tries to evoke the scene of the mystic nun issuing her clipped bursts of words. The instrumentalists become her eight attentive novices, sitting for long stretches doing nothing, or just breathing in anticipation (the sounds of, say, a flutist playing a short tone then audibly inhaling), or sometimes muttering some jittery, quiet miniphrase. Then Teyssier’s Maria would sing a frenzied burst of pent-up notes, and the instruments would scurry, trying to scribble down her words. Jacob Ashworth, Cantata Profana’s artistic director, conducted a suspenseful account of this radically episodic and spacey score.
The audience in pews sat in almost complete darkness; the players were illuminated by theatrical lighting, so you had to give yourself over to this contemplative program, even when you could not read the translations of texts, even if you lost track of what piece was being played. A large and appreciative audience seemed ready to do so on a chilly Friday in a Chelsea sanctuary.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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