Louis XIV, king of France and Navarre (1638-1715).
By Greg Stepanich
In the days when Louis XIV was an actual presence and not merely the name of a favorite rococo interior design fashion, the faithful gathered in churches for communion with the Almighty but also for music, for the sound of a pure, unclouded voice ascending into the severe angles of a sacred space.
That very same experience, without the king, was that of an audience Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, as two sopranos and an organist presented an hour of early 18th-century devotional music by two major French composers. This concert (called The Court of the Sun King: Music From Versailles), one in a series of summer events from Miami’s Seraphic Fire chorus, offered intensity and beauty in equal measure.
Sopranos Kathryn Mueller and Rebecca Duren, accompanied by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley at the petit orgue, performed four motets by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault and the three Leçons de Ténèbre of François Couperin. This is unadorned music despite its ornaments, a kind of Baroque style that has greater affinity with the plain sources of the Catholic liturgy than it does the powdered wigs of Versailles.
Mueller (at right) and Duren, both members of Seraphic Fire, have similar voices that are admirably suited for Baroque music. There is a clear, open quality to both of these singers’ instruments that is particularly impressive in the upper registers, where nary a vibrato wobble or sign of strain was heard. Mueller’s voice is slightly larger, rounder and more powerful than Duren’s, but both women sang beautifully, and demonstrated first-rate diction and high musical intelligence as well.
The program was sung without intermission, and began with the four Clérambault motets, the first in honor of the king (which by 1733, when these motets were published, was Louis XV), and the other three for the Virgin, Christmas, and Holy Tuesday. Clérambault’s style is very much of its time, though he also writes with some attractive variety, and his basic harmonic layout is less relentless than that of Couperin, which might have something to do with his being the younger man.
Duren’s ability to sing with a smoothness of line was readily apparent in the Motet de la Sainte Vierge (one of several Clérambault composed), and Mueller’s ease in the higher reaches of her voice was much in evidence during the Motet pour le jour de Noël. Both sopranos could be heard trading between higher and lower parts when singing together, with scarcely a noticeable difference, and during the Motet pour le Mardy de la Quinquagezime, they blended with exemplary loveliness at the words beginning Domine est salus.
Quigley, as always, made an expert accompanist, supporting and following his singers, and during the Christmas motet showing his usual engagement with the music by bobbing along in rhythm to the joyous text and music.
The three Tenebrae lessons of Couperin, written for Holy Wednesday in 1714, are with his books of keyboard Ordres his most celebrated works, and they are good examples of the vividness of Couperin’s musical language. Each of the initial melismatic settings of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet set a fresh color for the verses to follow, and the singers and Quigley were careful to bring it out.
This is demanding listening, with its spare performing forces and deeply pious focus adding to the challenge of its particular aural archaisms, but it repaid the effort with a shared concentration that was most noticeable during the interior pauses and the breaks between the separate lessons. Again, the crystalline clarity of the women’s voices was paramount, with Mueller showing this effectively in the long held note on the words ejus gementes in the Daleth section of the first lesson.
Duren’s purity of tone and trilling skill gave polish and nobility to the second lesson, and in the third, the climbing, sweetly clashing notes of both singers added a yearning quality that was quite attractive. At the end, too, Mueller and Duren (at right) had to leap into the upper reaches for a key passage, and both handled it with plenty of muscle to spare.
This was in some ways music only for the connoisseur, but the large audience at All Saints was deeply attentive throughout and amply appreciative at the close. Seraphic Fire and other area musical organizations have had a good run in the past year or so with explorations of the Baroque repertoire, and this visit to the world of French monarchism at its height marks another fine event in that series.
This program will be repeated this afternoon at Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. The concert begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30 and are available at the door, through www.seraphicfire.org, or by calling (888) 544-FIRE (3473).