Bach Festival Closes on the Reflective Note of Vespers

Not much Bach at the Long Beach Bach Festival this year, but the alternative repertory was well chosen. The festival opened a month ago with a tercentenary celebration of the late Baroque opera master Johann Adolph Hasse, and it closed Saturday at Bethany Lutheran Church with the Vespers music that Claudio Monteverdi published in 1610.

Composed at a time of stylistic ferment much like our own, Monteverdi’s “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin” reflect on the achievements of the past generation while suggesting multiple futures. With hindsight, of course, we know the directions that music subsequently took, but to conductor David Wilson’s credit he did not impose an evolutionary view on the work.

Instead he allowed it the full energy of unresolved potential, the performance--like the music--not at all conflicted by its own ambiguities. The soloists, the period instrument band and the chorus all had independent ideas about sound and texture, ornament and line. But inconsistency is not without virtue in a work that revels in dizzying shifts of musical focus and perspective.

Sopranos Rebecca Sherburn and Sun Young Kim, tenors Nicholas Larson and Christian Marcoe, and basses James Kinney and Scott Graff contributed mellifluous sounds--more confidently in the motets than in the Magnificat--as well as some inadvertent lessons in the perils of vibrato in this music.

Their choral colleagues from the Camerata Singers, on the other hand, appeared to better effect in the Magnificat than in the psalms. They provided robust vigor in the framing choruses, quiet dignity in the “Et Misericordia,” and held together much of the fragile center with beautifully sustained plainsong themes.

The small orchestra, including the winds of the Southern California Early Music Consort, supplied equal spirit, greater attention to style, and rather less control of pitch. The Magnificat nearly foundered at midpoint on the shoals of the high-flying, florid cornetto obbligatos, bravely but disastrously played. Poise prevailed, however, and the “Sicut erat in principio” thundered affirmatively.