Combining Art and Music Proves Elusive at the Getty

History is no longer just history.

On the one hand, history of, say, opera now includes the wide world, even its relationship with such matters as disease. Or history has itself as a subject: a narrative of historians’ attitudes toward Leonardo or Hitler.

And yet our musical presenters, be they at the Music Center, art museums or universities, seem downright incapable of making what one opera historian calls the “significant juxtapositions” between arts.

The latest attempt at this is at the Getty Center, which inaugurated a concert series Saturday, “Ancient Echoes: Music and Dance Evoking Greco-Roman Antiquity,” inspired by its exhibition “Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence.”

The concert program, the first of six through the summer, had yet another impressive-sounding title, “Musica Antica: Creating Ancient Music in Late 16th- and Early 17-Century Florence and Venice.” The evening of vocal numbers was put together by the local group, Musica Angelica. It was held outdoors in the courtyard, after museum hours, with “Beyond Beauty” remaining open for the audience.

The idea behind the program was an obvious one--music from the time of the first stirrings of opera, an art form that began in Florence as an attempt to reimagine the ancient Greek ideals of combining word and tone. Included were the famous opera composers Monteverdi and Cavalli, lesser-known figures like Guilio Caccini and Barbara Strozzi and a couple of genuine obscurities, including Vincenzo Bonizzi.

Some of the music--notably Monteverdi’s great aria “Lamento d’Arianna,” from a lost opera, and Cavalli’s “Aeneas’ Farewell”--had obvious thematic connections with ancient texts. But some of it, for instance Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger’s “Arpeggiata” for solo theorbo (a lute-like instrument with a neck as long a giraffe’s), didn’t at all.

Four singers--Judith Nelson, Jennifer Lane, Daniel Plaster and Curtis Streetman--were on hand. They were placed behind the instrumentalists--lutenists Michael Eagan (Musica Angelica’s director) and Scott Pauley and viola da gambist, Mark Chatfield--which reduced dramatic impact. The Getty has installed a portable shell against one of architect Richard Meier’s stone walls, but a not very likable sound system was also needed. The performers could be heard, but they weren’t flattered.

A courtyard is no place for delicate old string instruments. The sun went down, the temperature dipped dramatically and the instruments went out of tune. This meant a few minutes retuning before every number, adding, by my estimate, more than a half-hour to the program and breaking momentum. The music, too, is mostly intimate, and the Getty courtyard is anything but.

A few numbers took anyway. Lane is a strong, dramatic mezzo with a sure sense of period style and her performance of Strozzi’s “Lagrime mie” was devastating. Streetman was, to me, a discovery. A young singer with a booming bass, he regally cut through the difficult environment.

The loudspeakers were not kind to the instrumentalists, but Chatfield did overcome the electronics in a splendid virtuoso gamba solo by Bonizzi. Though a touching Aeneas in the Cavalli, Plaster’s tenor sounded strident through tiny speakers, which also amplified the now unsteady aspects of Nelson’s soprano in Monteverdi’s lament.

But that might have mattered little were there illuminating connections made between art and music. The suggestions were there in the gallery. Two heads of Achilles are neighbors, one from 340 B.C., the other a modern imitation.

There will be neoclassical 20th-century music later in the series (and reconstructions of ancient Greek music, too). But fear of significant juxtaposition keeps each in its place, and keeps the eye freer at the Getty than the ear.