Christ Church Spitalfields, London
This season's Spitalfields Winter festival is making a feature of Monteverdi's madrigals. It opened with a programme by the flexible early-music ensemble La Nuova Musica focusing on his Seventh Book, published in 1619, adding in a couple of items from the Eighth, as well as pieces by a handful of contemporaries.
The recurrent theme was love, frequently presented in stylised poetry exploring the emotional entanglements of nymphs and shepherds, given a heightened erotic charge via Monteverdi's highly expressive vocal lines and some telling touches of harmony; it is through such humanising devices that the first baroque master transmutes generic texts into something indelibly potent.
The consort's vocalists showed a keen appreciation of Monteverdi's methods and a consistent ability to realise them. Simon Wall relished the challenge of defining ornately decorated lines and was expertly matched by Thomas Herford in tenor duo partnership.
Bass James Arthur made a resounding success of the lower parts. Singly or together, soprano Helen-Jane Howells and mezzo Esther Brazil fielded lucid tone to present jointly the lovesick shepherdess of Io Son Pur Vezzosetta Pastorella. Above all, it was in the more grandly scored pieces from the Eighth Book that the group shone as a carefully balanced and well-coordinated team.
The ensemble's instrumentalists were less even and less dynamic in their interventions, skilful though their playing was. The group's director, David Bates, was effusive in gesture though occasionally less clear in articulation, allowing some momentary untidiness to creep in.
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