A warm union of harmony and sound
To find an audience, it is considered helpful these days to tie concert programs to the greeting-card industry. Valentine's Day was the convenient (if belated) peg for the Handel and Haydn Society at Jordan Hall on Friday night. Fortunately, the connection was underplayed. There were no hearts on the programs, and the musical selections made such beautiful sense, it would have been a success in any season.
Principal conductor Grant Llewellyn's idea was to combine works for small chorus and instruments by Claudio Monteverdi (from the Madrigals of Love and War, Book VIII) and Johannes Brahms (from "Liebeslieder," Op. 52, and "Neue Liebeslieder," Op. 65). This was a happy union, indeed: one composer a forward-looking innovator, the other a comforting traditionalist, both treating the same themes.
Monteverdi actually seemed the more modern of the two, with his jagged emotional gestures and strange harmonies. What genius in his "Amor, dov'e la fe," for example, in which a solo soprano sings of her betrayal in breathy off-beat to the chorus of men, nicely staged here with Jill Malin, a limpid voiced soprano, actually wandering the stage. The 16 singers, a subset of the H&H chorus, were deployed in shifting combinations and sang with superb control and warm tone. Especially fine was bass Donald Wilkinson's solo in "Altri canti di Marte." The only shortcoming was, perhaps, a lack of contrast between the gentle and warlike numbers; the latter needed an edgier, more visceral vocal style. (H&H's new artistic adviser, Sir Roger Norrington, might help here; he's known for that kind of thing.)
In the second half, the harpsichord was replaced by a piano, and four skilled hands played it (John Finney, Noriko Yasuda). Brahms's two sets of Love Song Waltzes explore, as Monteverdi does, the ups and downs, the longings and betrayals, of romantic love. The second set, written five years later, is superior, and ends with one of Brahms's more serene masterpieces, "Nun, ihr Musen, genug." Llewellyn made wise selections and conducted with breadth and grace. And there were several fine solo turns. In the audience, bodies were seen to sway to the waltz rhythms before setting out into the cold night. 