Kent Moussault / Umsagnir

The International Bach Festival is, once again, a very good reason to visit the island of Gran Canaria at Easter. Review: "Theodora" Las Palmas During the first half of the 17th century, the text ceased to be a pretext and, with instrumental works well integrated into society's conception of art, music that contained words distinguished itself in two aspects that gave much to talk about, ( more to theoreticians than to the public): the one that gave greater importance to the text, to the message, to semanticity, to prosody, to the beauty of the language, to the structure of the story, on the one hand, and the aspect that gave greater importance to melody, harmonies, textures and structure than music could give to a major work, on the other. This dichotomy continued well into the 19th century. The opera was no stranger to it and, therefore, the oratorio. Being these two very different forms, despite the fact that they almost completely share their shape, At the height of Georg Friedrich Händel's popularity, following the composition in 1749 of the Music for the Royal Fireworks and the tradition that generated the annual performance of The Messiah , the Theodora oratorio was created, premiered on Monday, March 16, 1750, in the middle of Holy Week, not in a church, but in the same place where the famous “Hallelujah” choir premiered: Covent Garden in London. Theodora is a martyr who consequently suffers misunderstanding and persecution, with the dramatic addition of the conversion of one of the protagonists to Christianity, at a time when this religion was not only prohibited but also persecuted until the year 313. AD the Emperor Constantine decided to make it the religion of the empire through the Edict of Milan. She tells, then, a story of oppression to which, as in most of the enduring classics, a love story is added. The story is beautiful, and is explained by Thomas Morellin an exquisite script in terms of the use of language, not so much in terms of the rhythm given to the work. Review: "Theodora" Las Palmas Continuing on its path of cultural and social success, and with quality as its premise, the International Bach Festival returns to its origins in this ninth edition, with a series of concerts of various formats that have the greatest media effort in this oratory. With the alma mater of Michael Gieler (viola soloist at the Royal Concertgebow in Amsterdam) and Adriana Ilieva(soloist viol of the Gran Canaria Philharmonic Orchestra), the festival unites qualified students and musicians from both orchestras on stage: the result is commendable. The stage of the symphony hall of the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium presented on the left an orchestra of 22 instrumentalists, on the right the solo singers, and behind and in two front lines facing the stalls, 11 male voices and 15 female voices of the Mateo Guerra Chamber Choir belonging to the Gran Canaria Philharmonic Orchestra Foundation. Kent Moussaultreplaced Michael Gieler at the last minute in the musical direction of the work. Unanimously winner of the first prize of the Budapest Directors Competition in this 2023, the young director showed mastery, temperance, and a good proceeding in the tempi and phrasing in baroque interpretation. The orchestra, with a smaller number of students from the Canary Islands than on other occasions, sounded with a very balanced and beautiful timbre, with great melancholy in the solo orchestral moments, good mastery of practicing the continuo in the recitatives, and resolution in the virtuoso passages. , entrusted in this work above all to the high part of the string. Let us remember that during the Baroque the extremes of the voices and instruments are polarized, and the hierarchy is established between the high-pitched parts, generally in charge of the melody, and the rest, in the form of accompaniment. The Mateo Guerra Chamber Choir directed by Luis García Santana , was one of the most sacrificed in the reduction suffered by the work. Even so, it had very good moments of balance and blending in the homophony, and vigor in the contrapuntal sections that separated the four voices (here the vocal differences were noticeable), highlighting the fullness and line of the middle female voices ( 6 contraltos against 9 sopranos, a group of 3 that exchanged range as reinforcement at some specific moment). Tania Lorenzo Castro, very committed, enjoyed and made enjoy. With the score practically from memory (something unusual in oratorios performed by singers with a thick professional schedule such as hers), the soprano from Gran Canaria dramatized the text and music in this version, which had no staging, and her large, liquid in the mids and highs was well calibrated in technique and style, which showed great knowledge of the baroque usage. The leading role of this role, which gives its name to the work, was at the height of its interpretation. Prohibiting the participation of women in liturgical choirs forced the appearance of castrati for the high voices in those roles that an adult had to play (the white voices of children did not work from the scenographic point of view neither in the opera nor in the oratory).Maayan Licht , countertenor with a clean and beautiful timbre, and medium volume, had his personal moment in “Kind Heaven, if virtue be thy care”, with an exquisite interpretation at times, closer to what was popular in the 20th century, at others. He weighed much more, but, his mastery of the technique, very attractive to the public in the eighteenth century and today. Review: "Theodora" Las Palmas Mezzo-soprano Gunhild Alsvik had a great stage presence. Her voice contains a beautiful charge of darkness in the mids and bass, and cleanness in the treble. As for the art of her singing, it is delicate but precise to establish the balance between the baroque and the nineteenth-century bel canto, and it seems that she was not so clear about it. The tenor Steven van der Linden was, together with the soprano, the best of the night. It's a pity that his role had less presence in the play. His interpretation was elegant and his singing line fluid, and the resolution of the melismas was more than comfortable. Bass Bozhidar Bozhkilov , with a beautiful big voice and remarkable timbre, was out of style. We do not have sound records from 1750, so musicologically it is difficult to establish what is and what is not in style, beyond the interpretation that we can make of the song treatises and the scores (which are not the music, but rather a guide). stop the music). It would be very interesting to listen to this interpreter in the verista repertoire. With the first two acts lasting 102 minutes, and the third about 22 minutes, it seems that the pause after Act II was interpreted by an important part of the public as the end of the concert. Whether that was the reason, or any other, the truth is that after that break almost half of the first amphitheater was absent. Therefore, it is more than pertinent to say that the preparation of a good hand program is recovered in these concerts, and they appear in the text (the work was interpreted almost completely with some minimal deletion), number of acts and duration of the same , pauses and, what is more than desirable, some notes to the hand program that, if they are done with rigor and rhythm, contribute to arouse even more the interest of an audience, sometimes reticent, precisely because of the anachronistic presentation of these shows that, being exquisite, As exceptional, it is noteworthy that the call to a mobile phone sounded in an extraordinary way in the room, on stage! The mobile phone of one of the singers was heard just after the music at the beginning of Act III had finished, and everything ended in the only and nice dramatization of the evening. The third act didn't seem to add anything to the story that couldn't be resolved in the first two acts (this time just before the break). The break for 22 more minutes of good music was expendable. It is an opportunity, and a pleasure, to listen to these works that are not normally in the repertoire. Theodora , although dramaturgically sometimes slows down, musically she is a jewel that makes us question how it is possible that, normally, she is not in the repertoire