Back in the day, Natalie Cole recorded “Unforgettable” with her then long-deceased father, Nat who participated in the video via grainy black and white film. It was eerie, almost Oedipal – daughter claiming father, raised interesting questions about appropriation of art and generations passing and technology advancing.
Gardiner at Carnegie Hall conducting Beethoven’s Ninth and his Missa Solemnis raised questions about perfection and technology. There were two back-to-back performances by Gardiner’s Orchestra Revolutionnaire and Romantique (“ORR”) and Monteverdi Choir – two collections of virtuosi brought together by him to express his own aesthetic.
I caught the Missa Solemnis only, in an auditorium jam-packed with, among others, a number of musicians on busmens’ holiday. Lurking in the background is Gardiner’s superb recording of the Missa from 1991 with the same choir and his other orchestral
ensemble, the English Baroque Soloists and some really brilliant sound engineering.
Is the Missa too big, too confusing, somehow misunderstood and relatively unloved at least in comparison to the Ninth? Perhaps. Gardiner plays it is like a giant roller-coaster that comes tearing down with great force and speed. It was so fast that I found myself closing my eyes. His “Credo” section – the brilliant 18 minute center of the piece – takes the recurring theme that precedes the statement of belief and coats both with shiny irony rather than profundity.
Missa is demanding. It is a frightening – it inculcates fear of God but also fear of humans not being perfect enough to get it right. Gardiner’s chorus consists of 8 on a part but it generates enormous sound, a solid 2-second reverberation in the hall With only 32 in theChoir, the articulation is precise beyond precise. Imagine 32 well-tuned singers shouting the Missa Solemnis in your ear from a far distance, as through speaking tubes.
The soloists were very strong: soprano, Elisabeth Meister, mezzo Jennifer Johnston, tenor Michael Spyres and bass Matthew Rose. Rose I also caught in Colin Davis’ more traditional Missa with the London Symphony last year at Avery Fisher Hall. Davis’s forces made a veritable “wall of sound” that any Nashville engineer would envy.
Gardiner is a literal conductor – what you see is what you get, and that is articulated, balanced, athletic, feral and beautifully tuned.
There are reasons to temper a direct comparison between Gardiner’s recording and the many wonderful interpretations from the past: by superstar conductors and soloists. Among the reference recordings are live performances by Toscanini (one featuring Bjorling, Milanov, Castagna and Kipnis from 1940 – pity Bjorling wasn’t available when Toscanini made his studio recording after the war – another one sung by Martinelli, Rethberg, Marion Telva and Pinza from 1935) and Bernstein and Levine, with large forces. But ultimately it came down to Gardiner versus Gardiner. If Gardiner in the Hall can’t meet or exceed Gardiner in the studio, what’s the point, really, and isn’t the theater dead? But I am happy to report that Gardiner in the hall won.