Trinity Baroque's Director writes.......

I first became intimate with Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 when I was revising for my school finals back in 1985. After wading for hours through convoluted physics formulas and heavy German philosophical literature I would reward myself every night with a chunk of the 1975 recording conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, and life and the world would feel wonderful again…

Though countless recordings and performances of the Vespers have of course been made since then, and countless theories on its precise purpose and performance practice have been conceived and experimented with, I have never heard or been involved with the music without experiencing its intrinsic passion, festiveness, power and just the sheer fun of performance.

There are few conclusive historical records on the Vespers; indeed, there is quite a strong consensus amongst musicians and musicologists that Monteverdi may never have performed the it as whole, or even conceived it as a whole, but rather as a collection from which movements could be individually chosen for the office of vespers. The continuous debates surrounding various issues of performance practice – forces used, performing pitch, order of the movements to name a few – requires directors to ‘arrange’ the music themselves – an exciting challenge.

The various movements yield a rich variety of musical style and format: fanfare, plainchant, intimate chamber music, powerful tutti textures, an instrumental sonata, echo effects taken from early opera. The performance in Brecon will involve strings, cornetts, sackbuts, organ and lute, a plainchant choir and eight singers for the psalms and concerti, sung one voice to a part. My sister, Rachel Podger, will be heading the instrumental ensemble. This is the first time we will have collaborated for quite a while, and I am really looking forward to putting on this special music and sharing ideas with her and the excellent line-up of instrumentalists the Brecon Baroque Festival have brought together.

Julian Podger

The 1610 Vespers
a cornettist's view

One of the greatest joys of performing the 1610 Vespers is not knowing quite what is going to happen. There are so many choices available to conductors, singers and instrumentalists that the work is continually evolving; there are questions of pitch, transposition, liturgical sequence, instrumentation and ornamentation. This is not to say that a conductor has not put hours of thought into how they are going to tackle this colossus of a piece, but when one turns up as a performer for the first rehearsal, whatever the conductor has decided to do with their interpretation, it will be ‘different’. This is part of the continuing fascination of this piece for me and why, every time I am asked to take part, I always know that I’m going to enjoy myself – it’s the same for me with Bach’s B Minor Mass.

I first became aware of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers while at university in Bangor in 1988. The opera L’Orfeo was a set work, an example of Monteverdi’s innovation, but the Vespers were cited as another piece where Monteverdi was breaking new ground. At the same time I had joined a brass ensemble that was going to Venice to perform the instrumental works of Giovanni Gabrieli. The coincidences did not end there, as the rehearsal venue that the brass ensemble used whilst in Venice was the magnificent Frari church, Monteverdi’s burial place.

 

In the following years, my interest in period instrument performance grew, firstly with my university postgraduate studies, then with my instrumental study at the Royal Academy of Music. It was while at the RAM that the players from the first incarnation of QuintEssential found themselves meeting several times a week to perfect the technique and interpretation necessary to deliver a convincing period brass sound. From these beginnings in 1993, the group has gone on to perform in countless performances of the 1610 Vespers, let alone the performances that we have taken part in individually.

Richard Thomas 2010 (leader of the QuintEssential Cornett & Sackbutt Ensemble)