Music Reviews : Roman Baroque Festival Concludes at UCLA

Although the lavish production of Landi’s opera “Il Sant’Alessio” received most of the advance publicity, the concluding event of the Nakamichi Baroque Festival, held at UCLA in conjunction with the UCLA Department of Music, may well have been its high point.

The Sunday afternoon program of 17th-Century Roman music was held in the acoustically hospitable confines of a largish concert room (not the main auditorium) of Royce Hall.

The music--nearly two hours’ worth, without intermission--was presented expertly, lovingly and with not a trace of solemnity. The performers, including the festival director, harpsichordist-organist-scholar Frederick Hammond, were liberal with enhancing, witty anecdotes to illuminate the hardly familiar music and milieu of Carissimi, Piccinini, Frescobaldi and other composers even less frequently encountered.

Carissimi stole the show from the start, with his gloriously Baroque (in both meanings of the word) motet “Confitebor tibi Domine,” performed with sparkling agility by sopranos Mary Rawcliffe and Kari Windingstad and bass David Thomas, with strong instrumental backing from violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and Katherine Kyme, lutenist Paul O’Dette and organist Hammond.

Carissimi subsequently showed his dramatic cunning in the few swift, pungent pages of the “Historia di Job,” in which the protagonist was countertenor Drew Minter, a singing paragon but a timid vocal actor, who might have taken some pointers from his partner David Thomas, the Chaliapin of early music, who plumbed the depths, rang the rafters and projected enormous physical presence as the Devil.

Elsewhere, there were lute solos and duos from O’Dette and James Tyler; canzonas for two violins and continuo and a just-short-of-interminable work for solo harpsichord by Frescobaldi, and, finally, yet another Carissimi stunner: the crunchingly dissonant and, contradicting its title, upbeat “Militia est vita” (“Life is war”), employing most of the singers and instrumentalists on hand in a rousing paean to, of all things, righteousness.

Well, it was written a long time ago.