Iestyn Davies is one of those hallowed few countertenors who can take a single note on a single syllable and spin it out into a long-breathed thing of immaculate beauty – shifting, modulating and shaped to tug at the heartstrings. And that’s what we heard from him last night at Sommets Musicaux, made all the more heartrending by the acoustics of the hall and the sensitivity of the accompaniment by Robin Ticciati and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The repeated words “Dove sei” (Where are you), from the aria in Rodelinda where Bertarido aches to see his wife, from whom the tribulations of war have parted him, were little capsules of pure vocal bliss.
This concert was the last in a short tour which, Ticciati explained, was the first time the Chamber Orchestra of Europe had played Handel and therefore quite a momentous occasion. You wouldn’t have known it; the strings played with bite, the woodwinds with character, the trumpets added celebratory or martial notes. In the opening piece, Handel’s Ode to the Birthday of Queen Anne, the trumpet solo was magnificent, interleaved with Davies producing more of those perfectly turned phrases in his singing of “Eternal source of light divine”.
We were treated to a fairly standard sampler of Baroque aria styles: the self-important entrance aria with high-speed semiquaver melisma (“Presti omai” from Giulio Cesare); the devotional (“O Lord, whose mercies numberless” from Saul, echoed by a glorious version of itself played on solo harp); and the rage aria (“Venga pur minacci e frema” from Mozart’s Mitridate), all of which Davies dispatched with aplomb.
With singing as wonderful as this was, the audience might reasonably have felt short-changed at not hearing more of it, with just half a dozen arias, none of them particularly long, in a concert 1 hour and 10 minutes in total. Also, anyone unfamiliar with the works will have struggled to know what this music was all about. With no surtitles, no text printed in the programme and Davies’ diction understandable only intermittently, even the polyglot Gstaad audience might have felt somewhat at sea.
While I’ve seen Ticciati conduct many times, all that has been visible is the top of that characteristically curly head as the rest of him has been hidden in an opera pit. So it was quite an eye opener to see the whole thing. Ticciati turned out to be a real fireball, seeming to be everywhere at once as he exhorted each section to give more. He’s also one of those conductors who acts out the music as a choreography, with sinuous arm and body movements.
In the concert’s closing piece, Mozart’s Symphony no. 35 “Haffner”, that boundless energy was there for all to see and hear. The first movement was delightfully joyful, taken at a brisk pace with generous accenting and a wonderful brightness of the sound, livened up by some exuberant trumpet playing. But you can have too much of a good thing, and the Andante felt rather rushed. The sound was well balanced and there was some notably lovely bassoon playing, but overall, the movement failed to provide the reflective calm one might have hoped for. The high energy levels were more appropriate to the Minuet and the Presto finale and you couldn’t fault the ensuing sound quality, but as an overall symphonic performance, less might have been more.
David’s trip was funded by Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad
