Christmas Vespers a true holiday treat
Splendid performance of early 17th-century music
Early Music Vancouver’s latest instalment in its longrunning annual Festive Cantatas series was Praetorius’s Christmas Vespers, a lavish imagining of a Lutheran Vespers service as might have been heard in the early 17th century.
The notion is the brainchild of the Toronto Consort’s David Fallis, who directed a sizable cast of singers and players in some five performances around the Pacific Northwest, in partnership with Seattle’s Early Music Guild, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, and the Early Music Society of the Islands. The final performance took place Sunday afternoon in a full-to-overflowing Chan Centre.
Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) sought to combine reformed German religious practice with the latest thing in Italian baroque style. It wasn’t a perfect marriage, but Praetorius’s music is showy, often direct, and invariably tuneful. Fallis enveloped a flamboyant German setting of the Magnificat with other appropriate numbers, and some snippets of music by Praetorius’s near-contemporaries, to create a charming afternoon of music, capped by rousing opening and closing chorals sung with lusty enthusiasm by the audience.
Taking every advantage of varied instrumentations and spatial effects, the project was consistently engaging. Fallis’s complement of singers and instrumentalists delivered with flair and a solid sense of style. As conductor, Fallis showed commanding familiarity with his material and a sure sense of how to make the trajectory of the whole flow. He emphasized contrasts in mood and material, and on occasion allowed what amounted to chamber groups to deliver with minimal direction, as in the sincerity of the carol Joseph Lieber, Joseph Mein, a touching postlude to the Magnificat.
Just as successful was the melding of a disparate group of soloists, period strings and organ, Montreal’s La Rose de Vents cornetto and sackbut ensemble, and Lars Kaario’s Laudate Singers.
This Christmas Vespers was an engaging blend of scholarship with honest sentiment plus all the bells and whistles that the early baroque could muster in service of religious music. The result was nothing less than splendid, one of the best musical treats of the holiday season.
This Christmas Vespers was an engaging blend of scholarship with honest sentiment plus all the bell sand whistles that the early baroque could must er in service of religious music.