Geneva’s La Bâtie festival is a wide-ranging, risk-taking delight, with this year’s programme bringing together electronic music and late Renaissance polyphony, fado and folk, in a joyous hybrid mélange. There is plenty of light, here, and plenty of darkness, too: at the intersection of the two, amongst the more classically minded offerings, you have Sparge la Morte.
Imagined by southern Italian directors Davide and Giuseppe Di Liberto, under the aegis of the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Sparge la Morte is a part-staged concert performance of a selection of Carlo Gesualdo’s most intensely moving works. Death is the heart of the matter here, in all the richness and variety that the Baroque iconoclast (and, it must be said, murderer) brings to the theme. But light inhabits the concert, too. The Eglise de Veyrier was draped in white shroud-like veiling for the occasion, inspired, the programme notes tell us, by a walk through Naples’ Fontanelle Cemetery, where the tombs are draped in plastic sheeting. Here, then, we have a meeting of old and modern, stone and neon, earth and light.
The performance alternated instrumental and vocal works, woven together into a breathless performance. The idea of drawing such an arc is an interesting one, though a few longer pauses, coming after Gesualdo’s series of rich chromatic shifts and almost-resolutions, might have let some of those final chords ring out just a moment longer (and given the audience a chance to readjust themselves on the creaky, narrow pews).
The singers of La Compagnia del Madrigale and the musicians of Il Pomo d’Oro performed in perfect stylistic counterpoint, so that the parallels in timbre between the instrumental and vocal music rang out clearly under the vaulted ceiling. The musicians approached Gesualdo’s compositions freely, and with plenty of emotion, letting tempi fluctuate, suspensions hover and slower transitions slip almost into glissandi. Mille volte il dì morò was taken at a playful, quick tempo, slowing right down to let those resonant clashes shine, while Ancidetemi pur left plenty of space for natural flux and movement.
The church in Veyrier is small, with a rich, rounded acoustic that blended the voices in their ringing, clear tone beautifully and let the high notes really soar, though it occasionally threatened to blur the faster-moving segments. Meanwhile, amongst an impressive ensemble performance by the musicians of Il Pomo d’Oro, particularly remarkable was Vanni Moretto’s performance on the violone, pushing the contrabass instrument into a raw, resonant tone that really set the stage for the more heart-wrenching segments of the programme.
Slightly less moving on the whole were the somewhat unfinished gestures towards staging: black-clad figures carrying neon bars in gloved hands, pushing a metal ladder back and forth, and so on. There were a few striking images – the shadows of moving hands pressed up against the shroud-like cellophane – but the music was really the heart of the evening. In the end, as in the musical performance itself, such imperfections only add to the richness of the texture.
