Monteverdi’s Vespers

 

Shriver Hall, Baltimore — March 1, 2020

 

Hello!

This page features preview clips (using this recording by John Eliot Gardner) that will be part of our work for the March 1, 2020 performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers at Shriver Hall in Baltimore. The performers will include the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, Baltimore Baroque Band, and Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, conducted by Blake Clark.

Our studio has been hired to create visual art for the performance. We're making a video project that includes entirely original footage shot in Italy, Spain, and the US. Some of the imagery is based on, and includes excerpts from works by Fra Angelico, Jan Van Eyck, Aert van der Neer, and The Osservanza Master.

A great inspiration to us, in addition to the music, was the painting of Fra Angelico. As we did some research into Fra Angelico's work we found some incisive theoretical writing by Georges Didi-Huberman. Didi-Huberman observed what he terms dissemblance and figuration in Fra Angelico’s work. Didi-Huberman's writing can be found in Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. These ideas resonated strongly with our concept for the project.

An example of dissemblance is below, an excerpt from Fra Angelico's Noli me tangere, where the marks/colors for the stigmata are identical to the marks/stigmata of the flowers near Christ’s feet. The stigmata are displaced and the same marks become flowers in the pictorial space. These marks reference things we know (flowers and wounds) and know as different, yet here they are visually identical, and neither literally portrays what we know them to be.

What is evoked, experientially, is a meditation on materiality, essence, and meaning. The quantity of marks — five flowers, echo the five wounds of Christ. Figurability has to do with experiences evoked from visual media that are unique to visual media, an a-rational realm of experience and thought exemplified in Fra Angelico's work.

To us the spirituality of the Vespers, and part of its mystery, is evoked by activities of transfiguration (we understand this is an Orthodox/Alchemical concept — things Monteverdi would have been familiar with). In Vespers the sacred and secular are interlaced, as are the traditional and new — a radical schema in its day. The work begins with a quotation from Monteverdi's opera Orfeo, yet, unlike the serial working out of the narrative found in his great opera, Vespers seems to present a parallel/simultaneous meditation on the essence of spirit and the sublime, where objects are formations of spirit — God is not “in” things, things are “of” God. The practice of the artist/alchemist/priest (Monteverdi, later in life, was definitely two, and may have been all three) is to evoke this revelation, not through argument, but via experience. In Noli me tangere the dissemblance evokes precisely this.

Please take a look at the clips below, please play them fullscreen and make sure they are playing in HD.  Performer information is in the video descriptions.

Please get in touch with any questions or comments, our site is linked in the upper left of this page.

Movements II-IV played without pauses, including visual crossfades between movements, individual movements are below

II. Dixit Dominus - psalm 109 {Motetto ad una voce}

III. Nigra Sum (Canticle) {Octo vocibus}

IV. Laudate Pueri - psalm 112 {A due voci}

V. Pulchra Es (Canticle) {Motetto à 6}

VI. Laetatus Sum - psalm 121 {A due voci}

VII. Duo Seraphim {A dieci voci}

VIII. Nisi Dominus - psalm 126 {Prima ad una voce sola poi nella fine à 6}

IX. Audi Coelum {Prima ad una voce sola poi nella fine à 6}

 X. Lauda Jerusalem - psalm 147 {Motetto à 7 voci}

XI. Sonata à 8 {Sopra Sancta Maria ora pro nobis}

XII. Ave Maris Stella {Hymnus à 8}

XIII. Magnificat {Septem vocibus et sex instrumentis}

We will be posting the fully realized version of the project, with accompanying music from the performance shortly after the premiere.