Early music ensemble pays glowing tribute to Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi, the first great opera composer, was born 450 years ago this May, and the anniversary was marked on Saturday evening by Consortium Carissimi, a Twin Cities early music group specializing in the Italian baroque period.

Outside opera, Monteverdi's masterpiece was the Vespro della Beata Vergine (the so-called "Vespers of 1610"), a collection of sacred vocal settings for use in feast day services.

It's unclear whether Monteverdi intended the work to be performed complete, but it usually is nowadays, and Consortium Carissimi gave a full, unexpurgated version lasting 90 minutes.

No corners were cut in the ensemble's lavish realization of Monteverdi's music. At floor level, in front of the choir stalls, a band of 16 musicians was deployed, playing instruments of Monteverdi's period.

Three sackbuts (baroque trombones) and a pair of cornettos (curved wooden pipes that sound like tiny trumpets) particularly caught the eye. So too did the guitar-like theorbos, their long-necked fretboards jutting skyward like a couple of flamingos.

Behind the players a choir of 12 voices stood on vocal duty. Kathy Saltzman Romey conducted, and immediately in the opening "Deus, in adjutorium" she achieved a glowing euphony of tone from the performers, with an excellent blend and balance between instruments and voices.

Warmth and sensuality were key elements in Romey's interpretation. Tempos were generally relaxed and flexible, allowing the singers room to articulate the tucks and turns of Monteverdi's ornate, highly embellished vocal writing.

Heilman also featured prominently in the motet "Audi Coelum." Here, his phrases were echoed from a side corridor by baritone Andrew Kane, to the mellow bee-buzz of Julie Elhard's cello-like lirone, and the warming pulse of Bruce Jacobs' chamber organ.

The "Sonata sopra Sancta Maria" showcased the soprano voices, floating seraphically over a busy instrumental underlay that included the chirruping cornettos of Bruce Dickey and Kiri Tollaksen, and a chuckling violin duet between Marc Levine and Miriam Scholz-Carlson.

The wonderfully colorful seven-part Magnificat that concludes the Vespers was, fittingly, a genuine point of culmination.

It glowed with devotional feeling, as a pair of burbling tenor recorders and echo effects in the violins and cornettos added further to the impression that praising God, in Monteverdi's musical language, is a tactile, pleasurable thing, not racked by guilt or heaviness of conscience.

That sense of pleasure was constantly communicated in Consortium Carissimi's performance. It made a fitting birthday tribute to a great composer, and it aptly celebrated the consort's own 10th year of operation.