Charm vies with silliness in Venetian serenades with Falk, Nuovo Aspetto
Music Before 1800 presented “Il Gondoliere Veneziano”on Sunday afternoon at Corpus Christi Church. The Venetian serenade was shorter and chillier than expected, as a winter storm knocked out the church’s electricity. With lighting but no heat, the intermission was wisely scrapped, but this musical journey featuring baritone Holger Falk and Nuovo Aspetto delighted nonetheless.
In the eighteenth century, Venice was known as the city of song, and gondoliers were among its musical stars. Visitors to Venice, including Goethe, Mozart, and Rousseau, spread the singing boatsmen’s fame throughout Europe. Their songs were sung in the open air, but over time, they evolved into a separate genre, becoming known as barcaroles or canzoni da battello (songs sung on a boat).
Giuseppe Tartini represented the Venetian school in song in this concert, while Vivaldi was heard in instrumental works that dotted the program. Songs by André Campra and Johann Simon Mayr demonstrated the pull of Venice and its gondoliers to composers across Europe. Many of the songs performed were folk songs or by composers whose identities are lost to time.
All are typical of the all-but-forgotten music that Nuovo Aspetto seeks out, dusts off, and performs to perfection. With Falk, the ensemble has an ideal musical partner who shares their innovative streak.
The sounds of modern-day Venice—church bells, conversations, waves, wind, and oars dipping into the water—were intertwined into the musical experience in a soundscape produced by Merzouga, the electro-acoustic musical team of Eva Pöpplein and Janko Hanushevsky. The combination was surprisingly soothing rather than distracting or jarring.
The concert began with Falk singing Tartini’s “Aria del Tasso,” unaccompanied from the rear of the church. In it, he summoned Venice’s glorious past as a maritime power, long over by the eighteenth century. As Falk walked to the front of the church, he sang “Il passagio notturno in gondoletta” by Domenico Cerutti, of whom nothing is known.
Falk’s artistry centers on his ability to convey character and emotion through vocal color, whether singing or speaking, as well as by enunciation and facial expressions. In Cerruti’s barcarolle, he employed them to summon a couple chatting about love while gliding on a canal in sensuous, warm tones versus the braggadocio of a gondolier with a much more jaded view of romance. He would employ such rapid and effortless vocal slights of hand to great effect in every song.
In “Dolce xe quel musetto,” Falk’s beautiful tone and sincerity painted the charms of the sweet Ninetta, further enhanced by subtle and delicate ornamentation in the reprise of the two verses. There was a sudden bite in Falk’s voice when he described that they only served to conceal her duplicity in the song’s final measures.
Falk’s approach is not always subtle. He engaged in far broader humor in “Dal cuor che tanto,” when he sang mockingly of a partner who is seldom in the mood for love, or playing the fool when singing derisively of narcissists in “Sono i zerbini come le rosa.”
When Falk simply spoke, as he did to begin “Un anguileta fresca,” his voice conveyed an equal span of emotion. His voice dripped with innuendo as he told of a man who gave his love a fresh eel and told her to hold onto it for dear life, lest it escape. Singing full voice, Falk collapsed in spasms of delight to depict the man’s ecstasy in so tight an embrace.
There were also pure, sweet expressions of romance, such as Mayr’s “La Biondina in gondoletta.” To the sounds of waves and oars dipping into the water, Falk sang of a beautiful blond girl lulled to sleep by the rocking of the boat. Her suitor, rather than annoyed, was enchanted by her physical charms. Falk summoned the great crooners of the past when singing of the man’s serendipitous glimpse of the woman’s breasts when the wind disturbed her veil. The man’s passion for the physical beauties of his sweetheart was expressed in sighs and singing as natural as speech.
Nuovo Aspetto highlights repertoire that uses harp, lute, and salterio, which is an Italian form of a family of instruments that includes the zither, hammered dulcimer, and hackbrett. The salterio was played in noble households, monasteries, and convents. One was bought for the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice when Antonio Vivaldi worked there, as he did intermittently throughout the first half of the eighteenth century.
The ensemble performed movements from several Vivaldi concerti, which featured Elizabeth Seitz’s ability to produce an intriguing variety of sounds on the salterio. Flutist Leonhard Schelb performed the solo lines in the concerti with impressive style. As an ensemble, the players delighted donning fezes, as did Falk, to impart a Turkish flavor to “Per mi aver Catina,” even joining in on the refrain of “Tarapatatatata,” and stirred passions in a lively tarantella.
Simon Shaheen and friends perform “Palestine Before 1800” at Corpus Christi Church, 4 p.m., March 2. mb1800.org
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