Concert
Emma Kirkby, Gillian Zammit;
The Valletta Baroque Ensemble; Cappella Sanctae Catherinae
St Paul’s Anglican pro-Cathedral
The double importance of this concert lay in the participation of world-famous British soprano Emma Kirkby and the official debut of The Valletta Baroque Ensemble.
The songs came across clearly and beautifully
It was the latter that opened the well-attended concert (despite the awful weather), its finely balanced delivery of a Dance Suite by Anthony Holborne combining the various textures of strings and instruments, such as the chitarrone, dulcian and a pair of sackbuts to provide a stylish performance.
Dame Emma was absolutely in her element in a series of four songs by John Dowland, accompanied on the lute by David Miller who also performed brief interludes after the first and second songs.
The songs came across clearly and beautifully, their almost ethereal crystalline quality ideal for projecting the sadness of I Saw My Lady Weep; Now, O Now, I Needs Must Part; in the briefest of them, Can She Excuse My Wrong and ending with In This Trembling Shadow Cast. Continuing in this first half, dubbed An English Rose, members of The Valletta Baroque Ensemble performed Purcell’s quite lively Three Parts Upon a Ground for strings and continuo.
Dame Emma returned with soprano Gillian Zammit in a fine rendering of the Anglo-German Handel’s De torrente in via from the Dixit Dominus setting of Psalm 109.
Dame Emma then proceeded to sing The Poet and the Rose by William Hayes, to John Gay’s sometimes spirited as well as reflective and moralistic lyrics. This first half ended with more music by Holborne, a set of dances performed by the ensemble, the lightness of which contrasted well with the preceding sober atmosphere.
Part two, Effetti e Stravaganze, featured music by Italian composers plus a couple of Italianate ones from beyond the Alps.
Zammit started with Di Lasso’s charming L’Eco with Dame Emma echoing the banter from deep behind the presbytery. In Johannes (Giovanni) Kapseberger’s charming Preludio e Toccata XI, originally for chitarrone solo, David Miller chose to perform it to continuo provided by harpist Jacob Portelli and the Toccata Arpeggiata on his own. Dame Emma returned with a passionate yet mostly restrained, and this all the more effective, L’Eraclito Amoroso by Barbara Strozzi to chitarrone and harp accompaniment.
Yet, at some points, one began to notice a slightly strident edge to the voice, something which later resurfaced in Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa with strings and continuo as well as sequences sang by members of the Cappella Sanctae Catherinae.
The latter, not in their full complement in places, did not have the full smoothness usually produced by the tenor section.
The rest of this section was by the Gabrielis. Giovanni’s Sonata for three violins, strings and continuo and Sonata a 8: primi toni e septimi toni were very finely rendered with the latter work exploiting even more the acoustic effects of the setting.
Sopranos, chorus and full ensemble gave a spirited account of Andrea’s Battaglia, managing to briefly render as ‘fun’ the horrors of war.
They glorified another kind of ‘war’ in the encore the sopranos and ensemble conceded, Sigismondo d’India’s Alla guerra, all’amore!