London boasts some of the most gloriously intimate concert venues – the Wigmore Hall, St John's Smith Square, the Purcell Room and now the new Hall 2 at King's Place – so when you find a programme for baroque chamber orchestra and counter-tenor presented in the cavernously unsympathetic bunker that is the Barbican Hall it's hard not to see it as a triumph of industry over art. This Wembley of classical venues holds almost 2,000 people at capacity and the brutally striated interior demonstrates roughly the same acoustic sensitivity as the average football fan when presented with the delicate and strange creature that is a counter-tenor.
Yet it was to a full hall that Andreas Scholl and the Kammerorchesterbasel performed works by Locatelli and Vivaldi on Sunday night – testimony once again to the enduring star-quality of this musician who ten years ago achieved the unthinkable when he made counter-tenors cool for the first time in 300 years. The subtly expressive musicianship and fragile purity of tone that made Scholl such a star of the recording studio are however precisely the qualities that suffer in live performance – particularly performances on this scale – and it is with regret each time I hear Scholl in concert that I am forced to admit that the magic of his particular vocal personality does not reliably survive outside the rarified studio environment.
The programme of Italian baroque music was built around two of Vivaldi's most famous cantatas, the Nisi Dominus and Stabat Mater settings for alto and orchestra, set against orchestral works by Locatelli and Vivaldi's curious Filiae Maestae Jerusalem – one of only eight surviving introduzione by the composer, intended as dramatic prefaces to larger works.
A solid journeyman composer, it was as a violin virtuoso that Pietro Locatelli made his name. His study in Rome gave him a grounding in the Concerto Grosso principles of Corelli, but the more freely soloistic approach of his later works reflects the influence of the progressive Venetian school of Vivaldi. His Concerto Grosso in E flat major which opened the concert is subtitled 'The Tears of Ariadne', and it is the tragic story of this heroine that shapes a work whose programmaticism is as organically integrated as any Romantic tone poem. Moving from contemplative pastoral pulsings to frenetic chromatic arpeggios via drawn-out suspension sequences, the work's ripieno sections bear all the classic hallmarks of the period.
More unusual, however, are the solo interludes in which Concertmaster Julia Schroder's enviably smooth and elegant technique was showcased in a series of histrionic arioso-like outbursts. With the violins split across either side of the stage, the drama of the antiphonal exchanges was wonderfully heightened, and the collective orchestral forces – directed by Schroder from the violin – were a model of focused, if slightly understated, energy. This opening work was however blighted by intonation issues between the continuo and upper strings, which despite multiple re-tunings never quite resolved themselves satisfactorily.
Both Vivaldi's Stabat Mater and Nisi Dominus are works that Scholl recorded early in his career (in 1995 and 2000 respectively), and after such an interlude it is interesting to hear the technical and interpretational changes. The invocation-like opening of the Nisi Dominus, with its starkly arching solo line, is in theory the perfect vehicle for Scholl's directional sense of phrasing and plangent tone, yet somehow failed to compel the attention in performance.
It would be too simple to attribute this to issues of balance – the playing of the Kammerorchesterbasel, though gutsy, was always sympathetic to their soloist and appropriately articulated – yet there was a fragility about the performance, particularly evident in bravura movements such as the Surgite and final Amen, or the 'nati poenas' section of the Stabat Mater that saw a tension between the full-blooded approach implicitly demanded by the music, and the limited physical capacity of Scholl himself.
His tone has acquired rather more vibrato over the past decade which occasionally led to a lack of focus, exacerbating the issue of projection. At no point was there any vocal evidence of strain or of pushing, and the technically immaculate production was evident in the fluid semiquaver passages of the Gloria and Amen of the Nisi Dominus, but sometimes all the musicality in the world cannot compensate for a little bit of all-out volume. I found myself longing uncharacteristically for the sheer vocal muscularity of David Daniels or even the piercing clarity of James Bowman.
The moments of the concert where the Scholl electricity did surface saw the music at its starkest and most pared back. The long exposed lines of the 'fructus ventris' in the Nisi Dominus with their delicate chromatic shiftings were delivered with an unnerving simplicity and directness, and the unaccompanied 'cum dederit dilectis', in which the vast hall momentarily had the intimacy of a salon, was genuinely startling. No one has sharper leading notes, darker minor thirds, or more heart-piercing chromatics than Scholl; his particular vocal colour and personality is all in the tuning, and thus in a concert of this scale it is only in the quieter moments that allow the space for this delicate musicality to flourish that we get the full benefit of his expressive instrument.
Related articles:
CD Review: Vivaldi's La fida ninfa (Naive)
CD Review: Vivaldi's Griselda (Naive)
CD Review: Vivaldi's Griselda (Naxos)
CD Review: Vivaldi's Atenaide (Naive)
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